A lot of catching up to do on the blog!
I’ve recently been down to the nursery where I normally buy
my potting compost, to stock up for the autumn planting, and bought three sacks
of my usual compost. Good stuff (you can’t
always rely on this, even from this normally reliable brand). It hasn’t always been thus. Back in June, I changed my routine and went
to a garden centre instead.
 |
| Good stuff |
In early June the weather had suddenly turned from unseasonably cold to very warm. One week I had given in and switched the central heating on for a couple of hours, the next it was windows open and curtains closed to keep the house cool. It was officially a heatwave (there are rules about this, apparently) – which meant a lot of carrying of watering cans up and down the garden. The nighttime temperatures more than doubled over two weeks previously, and the more tender vegetable plants (summer beans, courgettes) were planted out, and needed watering. In the greenhouse, the tomato plants were put into their d-i-y growbags, using up all the remaining compost that I had left over from the previous autumn – so a trip to get some more was in order.
Normally I buy my compost from a place whose main customer
base is the trade, but which sells in smaller quantities to domestic gardeners;
however I also wanted some bedding plants, so it had to be an outing to the
garden centre. Garden centres are
dangerous places; it’s all too easy to come home with all sorts of things you
had no intention of buying (especially plants).
This time I was quite clear in my mind what I needed, and
stuck to it. Besides needing the
compost, I wanted to put some summer colour into the windowbox. The windowbox is the only bit of the front
garden seen by most passers-by; there is a bed behind the front garden wall,
but it’s not easily visible from the road (which is usually a good thing!), and
the rest of the front is gravelled. I’ve
never managed the sort of spectacular container planting that some gardeners
achieve, but the windowbox had a passable display over the winter: a bronze
sedge, a couple of small rosemary plants grown from cuttings and a small
Euonymus ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’, also from a cutting, to provide a bright and
cheerful note; and some Crocus ‘Blue Pearl’ and daffodil ‘Tete a tete’ for
spring colour. But the bulbs had long
since died back and something more was needed for the summer. The garden centre provided a tray of pale
blue lobelia and a ‘Sunpatiens’ (sic), a bedding impatiens with nice pink
flowers. With a couple of lavenders –
more cuttings – and a few of my seed-grown Cosmos ‘Xanthos’, they made a decent
display. The sedge, rosemary and
euonymus were potted up, and the bulbs fished out and stored, all for future
re-use. The rosemary plants in
particular will be valuable, as the original parent plant is in poor shape (the
cold winter?) and ought to be dug out; I’ve taken more cuttings from it, but
having the two ex-windowbox plants as insurance is useful.
 |
| Window box, planted up |
I also needed ericaceous compost, to repot the two camellias in the front garden. Neither had been repotted for years; the older one, a Camellia williamsii ‘Donation’, flowers tolerably well but has become rather woody, while the other has never flowered, and I thought some fresh compost would give it a second chance. I’ve since repotted the latter, and it’s now looking a lot healthier, but ‘Donation’ is still waiting for attention. If there’s any compost left over I’ll use it to repot the azalea, which is seriously elderly and was brought back from the brink last year with careful pruning and the addition of some rather old compost round it. (I’ll be interested to see if the camellia that has never flowered blooms next spring, and if so, what colour the flowers are. When I bought it, I was looking for a red-flowered plant, and chose one based on the photo on the plant label. I was about to head for the checkout when I noticed another camellia with the same photo – but a different name! So I went instead for one labelled ‘Ruby Wedding’, on the basis that it ought to be red. But I’ve never had the chance to verify that.)
 |
| Camellia 'Ruby Wedding', repotted |
While at the garden centre, I also bought a couple of bags of soil improver, intended for those front garden beds behind the front wall. The soil there is atrocious, and a good layer of mulching with soil improver should help matters considerably. But since then I’ve found another area that could benefit from the stuff – so I may return to the garden centre for more!
Rather than carry on down the road to my usual compost
supplier, I thought I would save time by buying my ordinary potting compost
from the garden centre. Mistake. The peat-free compost brand that they sell is
a widely available one, which I’ve found in the past to be very variable in
quality. A few years ago I got some from
one nursery and it was reasonably good stuff, so I got some more (same brand) from
elsewhere and it was just wood shavings.
This time, when I got it home and opened up the bags, it was spongy stuff
with all the consistency of chewed-up felt carpet underlay. I used it with some home-produced compost mixed
in, and it has been just about ok, but I’m glad to have returned to my usual
brand. There’s some of the carpet
underlay left over, and I’ll spread it on a few of the veg beds as part of the
autumn mulching process.
Caveat emptor …
