At last some dry Weather!

Into my second week of holidays and the weather has been patchy to say the least! So frustrating when we had all that baking sunshine through July. Hey ho. Wednesday evening turned out sunny so I gathered up some motivation and headed out to try and finish weeding and tidying the patio. Now the dead weeds and rubbish have been swept up it looks not too bad. Can't say it makes me like the red slabs any more but I'm sure I can live with them for a year or so. 


The bench, which will get a coat of paint in due course and
some alpines

The picnic bench now in place and partially cleaned with a wire brush,
looks much better

 I have gone through all the plants we brought and pulled out the containers and tubs that are usually dotted about the garden. These are now positioned on the patio to soften the edges along the back of the house and to hide some gaps in the slabs. They all got a feed of pelleted chicken manure and a top dressing of fresh compost. A lot of the pots have been sadly neglected this year because of the house sale and move upheaval.

Some of the succulents grouped together

The herb corner, leading into the tropical area

About a month ago I bought two wooden planters and they have lain outside in their packaging, waiting to be built. The plan is to use one for culinary herbs and the other for fruit. They will be opposite the back door, so nice and handy to nip out and snip a few herbs. I do miss producing edibles from the garden so this will go some way towards being productive. I plant to grow sage, rosemary, chives, thyme and parsley. A few more annual herbs may sneak in next spring. In the fruit planter will go some of the currant cuttings I took from the plants at Easter Mosshat. They will be under planted with strawberry 'Cambridge', the very reliable strawberry I grew at Easter Mosshat and some alpine strawberries. Today I bought some multi purpose compost, John Innes compost and some grow bags and on the next dry day I shall mix it all together and get them planted up.

Lots of bits!

The finished articles

Yesterday we had a sunny, warm and dry day, so I spent most of it pottering about. This pottering involved starting to repot and tidy all the plants to go back into the greenhouse once they are rebuilt. The cacti and succulants look much better for this and a topdress of new gravel.

My Pelargonium collection has been sadly neglected this year, so after the succulents, I started working through them. I repotted them into fresh compost with pelleted chicken manure and gave them a haircut to encourage more growth and better shape. Because a lot of them had been in the same compost for a while and were very mushy. I shook a lot of it off before re-potting. This will encourage the plants to put on good new root growth too.

He's always there somewhere
Cacti  and succulents repotted and top dressed







Some of the newly re-potted Pelargoniums,
only 30 odd to go!



Greenhouse plants still to be tidied and repotted



The fruit corner
Earlier in the week we had a trip to Dumfrieshire to collect some bat monitoring equipment and we managed to squeeze in a trip to my old stamping ground Threave Gardens where I did my Diploma in Horticulture and various other qualifications. That was longer ago than I care to think about! It was strange going back and although there were many changes, a lot of things were just as they were 27 years ago. David, Ben and Daniel were very impressed, which was nice.

Butterfly on Agapanthus

Glasshouses in the walled garden

Threave House



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