I feel like I should be on the naughty step as this is my first Six on Saturday of this year! I do have a couple of bona fide excuses/reasons for not posting though, we spent time visiting my daughter and her OH in England during December and early January for the birth of our first grandchild, a beautiful little girl who they named Ella Rose. When we came home we had lots of time to catch up on in the work gardens as everything was/is on full speed ahead mode for spring. Anyway, enough of the waffling, here are my six for this week, and as always, if you want to see more or join in then pop over to https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/ where it all began, and the head honcho of Six on Saturday reigns.
1. The cactus bed in the daily work garden - This has been a year in the making but is finally finished, it’s gone from being a messy, hard to reach, water guzzling, English style bed into a neat bed that requires no arrosage (watering system) and very little maintenance. We finally laid the stones at the start of the month, all 5.5 tonnes of them, and although they look quite stark in the photos, they look great in real life and will soon have masses of succulents creeping across them. It was definitely worth the effort of removing and rehoming all the plants. I absolutely love this area of the garden now!
2. Lemons! - Last year was all about oranges, it was an amazing year for them. This year that award goes to lemons, we are inundated with lemons, these are just some of the lemons from the daily work garden, another work garden and our garden have heavily laden trees too. How many things can I do with lemons? So far, lemon meringue pies, lemon cheesecakes, lemon cordial, lemon and ginger cordial, frozen sliced lemons, lemon curd and frozen lemon juice, still to come are lemons in syrup and lemons in alcohol, along with any other suggestions I’m given!
3. Constantly clogged fountains to “eco” ponds - These fountains in the daily work garden were constantly getting clogged up and when the water ceased to flow the mosquitoes treated them like a spa resort. This year will be different, The “eco” ponds are on their way to being a mosquito buffet! Lots of oxygenating plants to keep the fish happy, we’ll soon have pond snails to help the bottom feeding fish keep the ponds clean, and lilies in there too to keep the balance right. The fish will eat the small mozzies and the larvae and when its s all settled it’ll be easier to maintain than the fountains. I’ve also added java moss to hopefully cover the concrete, the java moss should happily survive the winter here as the fountains are in sheltered spots.
4. Terrace pots - I have a love/hate relationship with these pots on the terrace of the daily work garden, the succulents are fantastic and flowering like crazy at the moment, the cactus, mainly opuntia microdasys look beautiful but are on a mission to get me every time I go within a foot of the pots. The tiny glochidia not only release on contact but also in the wind (which we get a lot of), antihistamines and hair removal wax strips are now a constant in the car.
5. Crazy flowering pelargoniums, in FEBRUARY - along with other things in our garden that really should still be asleep at this time of year, like Dahlias, and the glads that I toyed with ditching after they had severe rust and red spider mite last year.
6. Other things in bloom around the daily work garden - I’ve been working like crazy for the last couple of weeks to get the roses pruned, they happily flower all year here but do better if I prune them in spring and make them behave as if they’d slept for the winter, all done and manured so they can burst into life again. The rest of the garden has meanwhile been waking up and enjoying the sunshine, I love working to the constant buzz of bees going about their business, here’s some snapshots of things in bloom at the moment around the garden, and where the Erigeron, like my pelargoniums has got the date muddled up.
That’s it for my Six on Saturday, hope it’s a good week for everyone 😊
