Despite my almost-best efforts of keeping the courgette plants watered I clearly didn’t quite manage to give them enough as two of them have gained slight splits in the stem
The splits are bad as it means the plant is compromised so it won’t produce as well as a healthy plant and it stands a good chance of dying early
After some internet searching there seems to be a theory that covering the split with soil may help; so I’ve done that and will keep my fingers crossed that it helps!
About four years ago my parents bought me a Passion Flower for a birthday present – which sets a certain level of pressure from the start!
The first two years it flowered and was gorgeous, last year it did very little generally and there were no flowers to speak of
Then we had a very hard winter and I was fairly convinced it had died – even cutting it back didn’t spur any growth
(Picture from RHS)
So I moved it to a new pot in a new more sheltered position – which still gets sun until about 2pm ish
It’s now shown signs of life and has grown about a metre, however there are absolutely no flowers!
Thankfully this might be normal according to the internet, possible helpful things to do are make sure it has sun, frequent water and feed it with bonemeal
The first two should be ok, so I will try adding bonemeal to see what happens!
I’m not sure why however there seem to be a lot of oddly shaped strawberries growing at the allotment this year
This is one that doesn’t look too much like male body parts
we have so many strawberries – mutant and otherwise, that I need to check how best to freeze some pretty ASAP
For the last couple of years we’ve grown courgettes and it turns out that I do like them – which is good as last year we ended up with silly amounts
This year I decided to try growing round courgettes – a decision based purely on finding reduced price round courgette seeds!
(Picture from Pinterest)
Currently the few fruits on them are the size of golf balls, which is too small to bother with however I’m not entirely sure what size will be the correct size!
Hopefully they will grow a bit more and I can find out, however at the moment I am finding normal shaped courgettes a lot less confusing!
In October 2016 I bought pear tree for £5, last year it did nothing at all
However this year is looking potentially promising and I’m ridiculously excited
Although now I really need to look up how if there is anything I should be doing to make it happier!
And yes the rhubarb in the background has started growing a little extremely!
The time I allocated to sort out this week’s posts and generally sort my week was eaten by having to hurriedly repot all the tomato and chilli seedlings as it transpires they cheap seed compost from Aldi is indeed very cheap however it’s also very heavy and had meant very stunted roots
Which is vexing, however it was very cheap and and was worth a try, however I am not buying it again!
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Aldi had some funky tall pots that looked a good height (and weight) for the front of the house
Initially I bought some lovely red grasses that promised to be low-maintenance and evergreen: they went rotten absolutely rotten and black spotted with ick
So I’ve abandoned that plan and given into my husband’ pestering to get some box plants. I’ve never really liked box, it reminds me of overly formal planting. However I’ve promised to be more open minded if the box can be a topiary experiment – preferably something mildly obscene in shape
(Photo from Wisbech standard who also handily mention the possible public order offence)
The internet tells me that it will take a while (years) to get enough bush to meaningfully shape and that for now I should give the plants lots of feed and consider making a template or frame to help prune it once it gets big enough to look phallic
If all goes well I could start to like box after all
Copyright © WhereEvilThoughts 2018 – excluding pictures! Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to WhereEvilThoughts with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
Hepaticas are small pretty little alpine plants that flower around this time of year
My parents kindly, and randomly, bought me some of the nobilis variety last year and they flowered very well this year – so well in fact that my parents bought me a few more by mail order from a specialist nursery
This is how they arrived:
It certainly looks special but not in a good way… I planted them up immediately and am now hoping they survive, however they look very miserable and traumatised
The newspaper they are packed in is the Daily Mail, which seems an odd choice given the cost of the plants and who I would expect to be the general target audience of expensive alpine plants. Or maybe I’m distracting myself with trivial things to block out how flat out iffy Wednesday was
Copyright © WhereEvilThoughts 2018 – including pictures for a change! Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to WhereEvilThoughts with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
Buying random fun seeming things does happen in my household, although they don’t tend to be *this* random normally
At least I didn’t buy a pink gnome…
Copyright © WhereEvilThoughts 2018 – including pictures for a change! Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to WhereEvilThoughts with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
I didn’t think I liked parsnips based on the burnt sticky things that accompanied occasional meals out, however it turns out that I do like parsnips when they aren’t overcooked; which was a good enough reason to decide to grow them in 2018
Parsnip seeds are apparently not very stable to the extent that using old seeds can lead to poor results – “old” can apparently mean even last years – which could be a pickle as my seeds for this year were bought in last year’s end of season sale
However I plan on trying them anyway, apparently parsnips should be sown directly into the ground between late March and June; planting earlier isn’t a great idea as parsnips hate wet soil and want the soil temperature is 12 degrees Celsius.
(Photo from Pinterest)
The seeds should be sown thinly, or clump three seeds together 1.5cm deep and with 15cm intervals between sowings – multiple rows should be spaced 30cm apart. Germination sounds very slow, up to 28 days, during which time the seeds may want watering if it’s very dry
Once germinated the seedlings want to be spaced 7cm apart – unless you want big roots at that point 10cm is better. Once they are growing parsnips don’t want much attention – however being too wet or too dry will split them.
Harvesting – the best bit of growing anything, can be from late Autumn until the end of January; the foliage beginning to die back is apparently the main indicator. Although apparently even after the foliage dies back the roots can be left in the ground and picked as wanted. Rumour has it that being left in the ground until the first frost will lead to sweeter roots – I will be testing this!
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Where evil Thoughts 