Fuchsias from Dick

Fuchsias from Dick

My friend Dick from church has given me 4 big pots of Fuchsias over the last few weeks as well as two standard Marguerites!

His daughter gives them to him but he says he just doesn’t have the room for so many big plants in his tiny garden! The day he gave me the Marguerite standards I went with him to his house. He really does have a tiny garden!

Actually you can’t really call it a “garden” as it more like a border that runs around the four walls of his bungalow!

He lives in a retirement flat that is a converted out-patients unit. The old hospital here in Huntingdon was closed down many years ago & a new one was built. After being closed for a number of years it was converted into a retirement facility with an enormous extension being built onto the old hospital.

In the grounds stood several out-patients units. These have been converted into single residencies/retirement bungalows. Some are joined together & some are individual bungalows. Dick has a tiny garden, no bigger than my balcony at the back of his bungalow but there are no walls or fences that separate him from the street really, in fact anybody could walk into his “garden” at any time. Fortunately this doesn’t seem to happen or he hasn’t mentioned anything to me at least.

Here are some photos of the Fuchsias he has given me:

Here they are still in their original clay pots:

Here they have been repotted into big plastic pots:

These are close up photos of the 2nd two plants he gave me – these were without pots & I had to repot them the day after he gave me them:

Here are the last two Dick gave me (in the bath!):

As he had removed them from their clay pots, which his daughter wanted back, he put them in plastic carrier bags to bring them up to me! I didn’t have enough compost to pot them up so they had to spend a day in the bath! The next day I went downtown & bought a couple of bags of fresh compost.

Marguerites:

Before I finish I want to show you the 2 standard Marguerites he also gave me:

In direct sunlight these flowers almost burn your eyes out – they are so brilliant!

My sincere & grateful thanks go to Dick for his generosity!

Mini-Daffs & Tulips in pots on the balcony railings

Mini-Daffs & Tulips in pots on the balcony railings

I planted some Mini-Daffs & Tulips in pots on the balcony railings in mid-October after removing the Begonias that had grown in them all summer a few days before.

I had bought some packets of small Narcissi bulbs & dwarf Tulips precisely to put in these :

but I also put some in the troughs on the bar that goes around the middle of the balcony railings.

As I have 3 troughs I planted them all exactly the same so I’ve added photos of all 3 troughs showing how I put short stemmed Tulips, mini-Daffs &, finally, Crocuses on top but only one of each trough:

I have planted up the 8 clay pots I have, 2 of them new, as well as 2 plastic pots & have put them in the aluminium rings I bought & used many years ago in Spain when we used to live over there:

At the present moment I don’t have any Pansies or Violas to overplant them with as I do every year. I hope to get some soon from the open air market in town.

Other years I’ve bought them there & they have done pretty well though I’ve had little success with them for the last few years. Several years they were infested with a heavy plague of tiny, itsy bitsy grey-white aphids that cover every green surface & suck the life out of the plants.

I mentioned this last year to the lady on the stall, when I was buying last year’s plants, & she assured me it wouldn’t happen again this year as all their plants are treated with a systematic insecticide before leaving the greenhouse.

In effect they didn’t become infested but they died mysteriously in the spring before they had chance to flower but I’ve absolutely have no idea of the cause! They just collapsed as if their roots had been eaten away or they had rotted away. On removing them I broke open the rootballs but they weren’t rotting nor did I find any sign of anything eating their roots, the rootballs were chock a block of roots. The only symptom I noticed was that they collapsed & turned brown. I hope that doesn’t happen again. They had been planted in new compost: I’d renewed the compost in all my pots & troughs last year before autumn planting.

I also planted up the 3 big, white troughs on the balcony floor, up against the railings. I put long stemmed Tulips & Daffodils in them & overplanted them with a few Crocuses from the last 2 years that had survived. Many of the Daffs will be quite small I think as many of them didn’t appear to be of flowering size. I’ll have to wait & see what happens.

When I get some plants to put in I’ll post a last photo here.

Amaryllis hybrids have now begun to flower!

Amaryllis hybrids have now begun to flower!

Though I’ve mistakenly put Anglo-American hybrid on some of the photos! This particular bulb is one of 3 bulbs that I put in the same 5″ pot last year when I was repotting many of my bulbs last year.

At least one of the pots was mistakenly put in the other bedroom with the Anglo-American hybrids. I really should have realised what had happened when the scape began to grow as it is in a pot with several other offshoots which I intended to separate & repot this year. All my Anglo-American hybrids were put ONE to a 5″ pot last year. NONE went into a pot together. This alone should have made me suspicious when I started labelling it as an Anglo-American Amaryllis!

Many pots last year were overcrowded with the new offsets that had been forming & were breaking the pots. I use plastic pots, not ceramic or clay so they are easily damaged when the bulbs/offsets begin to expand. As this process has to be done while they are dormant it wasn’t until February 2015 when I finally got around to doing it.

(Wrong date – should have been 16th January 2016!)

This year I’ve been confronted with a similar problem only I started to “tackle” it back at the end of November/beginning of December before I brought the plants home from the greenhouse on Gerry’s allotment. As space in our flat is really at a premium, & there was even less this year, I decided to empty out as many of the the remaining pots as I could in order to save on space in the flat during the winter. In previous years they used to spend the winter in their pots on the windowsills of our 2 bedrooms & in the kitchen where we have a 3m (10ft) windowsill. Last year all these windowsills were filled up to their maximum capacity – even though they were in tiers 4 rows high!

So many had to go on top of a big wardrobe in one of the bedrooms. None received any water until buds were seen to be coming out of the necks of the bulbs where upon I began to give them a little water again, increasing as time went by.

All the pots in one bedroom windowsill had to go out onto the balcony in mid March – the first time I’ve ever put them out so early as we often get frosts till the end of the first week in May some years. I did try to cover them with a plastic sheet on nights when frost was forecast & fortunately they all survived! :-)) I also took them down to the Gerry’s greenhouse on his allotment much earlier than other years. The greenhouse has no heating & a couple of pieces of glass had got broken during the winter making it prone to frost. Nevertheless they still managed to survive & were later moved out of the greenhouse on to some shelving on the plot itself for the summer. I had to take my bulbs down in several journeys over several weeks as they finished flowering at home.

One bedroom windowsill has 4 tiers of bulbs – all Amaryllis hybrids I’ve grown from my own seeds:

These have grown & flowered & multiplied over the years. I only started giving them water a couple of weeks ago. Some will have to me moved into new pots as lots of the pots have 5-6 or more offsets in them! Last year I didn’t have the space, compost or pots to pot up everything into its own individual pot. Although I don’t generally let offshoots or seedling bulbs go into hibernation till after they have flowered for the first time I just couldn’t leave them growing this winter.

I may lose a few bulbs because being so small they are unable to store sufficient water or food. Nevertheless I expect the majority to pull through with very few casualties.

I’ve put 20 big bulbs in 6″ pots now on the kitchen windowsill, they all have buds at different stages, some are only just peeping out of the bulb neck, others are several inches high already.

These were some of the bulbs I put in paper bags to remain dry over the winter:

Some of those that I emptied out of their pots in the greenhouse last December. The buds had started to grow quite high on some of the bulbs! These will be in flower in about a month’s time. During February I will have dozens of bulbs flowering – as well as in March & April! Having so many I have to start them off over a period of a couple of months so that way I get flowers for several months in a row!

Fab Feb Favs

Fab Feb Favs

I just want to make a blog with some of my Fabulous February Favourites!

I’m starting with my balcony as it shows some of my Fab Feb Favs like Crocuses, Pansies & Violas! These brave & colourful little plants can be relied upon to put up a great show every February.

The following four photos, all of which I took today, show the 3 white planters which have lots of Pansies & some Crocuses, which have started to open this week:

The first few Crocuses have opened now in this pot. The confer has been underplanted with small bulbs for several years:

I love to underplant Violas/Pansies in the clay pots on my balcony railings with small bulbs, most often Crocuses

On my way into town this morning I changed my usual route a little & instead of going through the all the shops I went along the path beside Huntingdon Town Park.

As I began to go along the path I noticed a clump of Snowdrops:

I went into the park & spied more clumps:

In this last photo you can see little clumps all alongside the bank of the Brook, which on occasions floods the park. In a couple of weeks time they will look better.

As it was such a lovely sunny day today I took this photo:

I saw these Winter Aconites, looking for all the world like a bunch of Buttercups amongst the dead leaves & the grass! They are amongst the very first I’ve seen this year so far – at least!

Well these are some of my Fab Feb Favs Hope they are yours as well!