Late May

Looking back, making notes – tulips.

You think you’ll remember, but you won’t. There’s a whole blog post on this but can I suggest you get a notebook? Also, a reminder to take snaps of the garden on your phone all the time. You will thank me for this in November.

Weeding.

This rain has had two consequences, both of which have led to me feeling not a little overwhelmed. Firstly, I haven’t been outside doing that everyday level of pottering and tidying. Secondly, everything is growing like the clappers. The opium poppies are in their strongest stage of growth and I swear they are putting on inches a day. The field is verdant, but chaotic. There are nettles in with the peonies and the hoggin paths are full of self-sown erigeron annuus. There were pockets of sunshine yesterday and I did my best to get some toehold on it all, but the secret to a happy life is having the wisdom to know what you can’t change, and there is some acceptance that I am probably not going to get on top of the thistles until the end of June.

Sowing biennials.

Biennials, confusingly, germinate and grow on in one year and flower the next. They need a period of cold to trigger spring flowering. I found this out by over-wintering a whole tray of honesty in the greenhouse, thinking I was being very kind, and they took three years to flower instead of the usual two. The wonder of biennials is that you get beautiful flowers in that slightly odd gap between tulips and the autumn sown hardy annuals really getting going. If you like the flowers at Chelsea, you probably like biennials.

Now you can do this as late as July but I for one will be having a little sit down and possibly a gin by July because I am expecting the sun to have finally made an appearance. If you have a minute between the weeding and the getting back to having a social life, it really is worth it.

Potting up dahlia cuttings

I think all the seed companies and nurseries have been completely inundated. I received my Halls of Heddon dahlia cuttings this week and I will admit, I was starting to panic a little bit about them. We must be past the last frost date in Somerset, surely we must. Usually I start taking chances from mid-April and get away with it, but this year is so utterly topsy turvy, I have no idea what might happen. However, frost is not the reason I am potting them up and nurturing them in the greenhouse. The reason is slugs. This rain has meant a proliferation of them and some of my over-wintered dahlias are showing signs of being munched. They will be fine because they have massive tubers and they will just keep sending up shoots until the rate of growth overtakes the rate of muching, and then they will shoot up into the air. These perfect little cuttings, all four inches of them, they will be grazed to the ground overnight and that will be that. There is no way I am risking them until they are big and strong, or until this horrendous damp weather abates a bit and there is evidence that I have got on top of the issue.

Deadheading irises

Most of the flowers out now are one hit wonders. You can cut your tulips and your lilac and they aren’t got to send out more flowers. However, if you keep on top of your iris dead heading, they will reward you. Just carefully snap off the spent flower, leaving the green protective part intact, and another bud will appear behind it. For all other things iris, there is a video of India sharing all her knowledge here.