The Garden

One nice thing to return to, especially after so much rain, is the Scottish ones garden. I'm nominally in charge of it but I don't really spend a lot of time there to do anything very exciting - or which involves much actual input. I was there for 4 hours on Monday afternoon but managed to fall asleep for almost two of them, even so a mountain of weeds and dead headed bits was produced. 

There are a mass of things I'd like to grow, Sweat peas being top of the list and there is the perfect spot for them, but with all our coming and going this year we would have missed them so instead I took my inspiration from a Sarah Raven programme I saw in the spring. She was talking about modern flower meadows - the idea is basically to throw a lot of seeds at the ground and end up with a bee friendly swathe of flowers, which if properly organised should also last for weeks. I thought I'd try it.

So far so good, everything went in late thanks to torrential rain and being away in May, but despite near monsoon conditions at a critical moment (it seemed all to likely that everything would wash away) the results so far are really encouraging. I wasn't overly scientific about it because I didn't have much money to spend, but after gathering together all the packets of seed hanging around (some quite old) and investing in some extra night scented stock there was quite a respectable amount, better yet most of it appears to have germinated. Six weeks in the stocks are flowering, nasturtiums are looking good, the very old borage is putting in a appearance, as are some marigolds, and slugs haven't totally decimated the cornflowers...

I'm really pleased with what's been a very cheap experiment - even if I had bought all the seed again I'd probably still have had change from a tenner, coincidentally things haven't all come out at once so there should be plenty to look at for months yet, and best of all it's very low maintenance. I'll do it again next year, possibly on a larger and more thoughtful scale.

The other happy news is that a rose I thought had snuffed it after an unfortunate encounter with a mini digger and an over enthusiastic architect has come back to glorious life.