Garden Centre

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Greenhouse gardening March

I really don’t know how I coped without my greenhouse. Six months after I cursed it roundly and retreated to the house to make tea and treacle tart for my other half – who then spent two days putting the 471 piece monster together while regularly being fortified with said tea and tart, I spend at least an hour a day in it.

Here’s what I’ve got going on:

• Three trays of broad beans
• One tray of native trees - a sort of goody bag of who knows what? So far what = one seedling ...
• One tray of passionfruit seeds (an experiment – can a passionfruit vine be grown from the seeds of a supermarket passionfruit? We’re going to find out …)
• Six pots of sweet peas
• Thirty-six pots of nasturtium seedlings (don’t ask, other half got carried away with himself)
• Three pots each of Love-lies-bleeding, sage and dill, which will be the nucleus of my new herb bed
• Twenty-four pots of seedling alpine strawberries
• Twenty transplanted celeriac seedlings
• Thirty-six pea seedlings in toilet roll inners
• Three over-wintered fuchsias
• Two tubs of wallflowers

The passionfruit is going to be interesting because if they do grow I shall probably have to give them all away, not having a single south facing fence that isn’t already covered with: jasmine, winter-flowering clematis, pyracantha, Iceberg rose and fig tree. All the people I’ve spoken to say that the secret to growing passionfruit is heat and freshness of the seeds, and as these went straight from fruit to pot in about forty-five seconds, I’m confident that freshness isn’t an issue.

There is a bit of an issue in the greenhouse though – I can’t actually turn round in a hurry because if I do, I end up knocking something to the floor. I just hope that the weather remains gracious so that I can start planting things out next weekend!

Labels: broad beans, fuchsia, greenhouse gardening, iceberg rose, march greenhouse, passionfruit, peas, wallflowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:55 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, December 28, 2008

Christmas roses

It’s very odd, but one thing that you can rely on, or at least I can, is my Iceberg rose producing at least one flower in time for Christmas. It’s an amazingly hardy rose, very suitable for beginners and the one rose I would recommend for anybody who has problems growing other roses. Here's mine in full summer flower.

It’s sold as both a free climber or a standard floribunda and it’s the climber that seems to always give Christmas gifts. The RHS says it bears medium-sized, white blooms, starting from shapely pink-tinted buds, (which) appear very freely almost all season. Hmmm. At any season, would be my judgement.

In my life I’ve had three Iceberg roses in three houses, two were pinkish in bud form, one wasn’t. One of the pink budding ones was lightly scented, neither of the others were. When you buy, it sometimes says that Iceberg is lightly scented and sometimes unscented – weird. The floribunda is more likely to be scented, as far as I can tell from decades of sniffing other people’s roses.

But honestly, although I think a flower without fragrance is like a dog without a tail, if you can cut a rosebud from your garden on Christmas Day, it really would be asking too much to have it scenting the house as well.

Labels: iceberg rose, RHS, winter flowers, winter rose

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:30 AM 0 Comments

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