A rosy glow.

My world smells lovely at the moment.

Can you ever have too many roses?  I suppose the answer to that question depends on how much you can stomach squishing greenfly between your thumb and forefinger, as that seems to be a fairly incessant task at present.

Have been cutting my Constance Spry, Gertrude Jekylls, New Dawn and Falstaff to make some lovely scented bunches for my market stall, and have even braved the thorny stems of the picture perfect noisette, Felicite Parmentier - so blush pink and lovely despite the spikes.

New Dawn and Contance Spry - soft, pink and lovely.

Finding the perfect cups to match them is always fun - I don't especially like Royal Albert's 'Old Rose' pattern, but you would think it had been designed specially to host Falstaff and Absolutely Fabulous, my yellow stalwart.

Dark Falstaff roses with the yellow floribunda Absolutely Fabulous

On the back of all this romantic rosiness, I even braved a trip to the rather gorgeous local wedding shop last week to offer them a weekly bunch in exchange for displaying my card.  The flowers do look like they have found their rightful home amidst all the wedding gowns, so am hoping (and feeling scared) about getting some enquiries via that route. Mind you, I can remember feeling the same about market stalls earlier in the year and now take these in my stride.

I'm spoilt for choice in the garden at the moment for scent, colour and form. Even picked my first dahlia last week, so am hoping that they will all start swinging into action over the next few weeks. 

Must get down to the allotment today to tie in all my sweet peas and to check on the progress of the soft fruit. Am pretty sure the gooseberries will be ready for picking, and with any luck the fat pigeons will not have torpedoed the netting on my cherry tree.  Last time I checked, it looks like being my best ever cherry crop (the tree is now about 5 years old), so am very excited as they are one of my favourite summer eats.  The redcurrants in my gardens are also starting to blush and I'm hoping that the ones on the plot are slightly further on as they get a bit more sun in that location.  I sense a jam making extravaganza in the next few weeks so will have to start burning the midnight oil to process all my garden bounty at this rate!

To market, to market....

Have had a productive day in the garden and allotment.  Turned over a patch which I'm bringing into cultivation at the plot - so strange to be able to just dig, without needing to go round things or avoid bulbs etc!  Will keep these patches for annuals so that this bare earth approach can be repeated again later in the season.

Found that I (and a generous neighbouring plot) had parsnips which had gone to seed from last year - they make fantastic cut flowers, but the purported coconut smell which on of the #britishflower folk tweeted about on Monday night was not evident. I had a good sniff, but my snoz detected only...well.... parsnip....  Gorgeous flowers though and I have a huge bucketful of them conditioning in the shed overnight.

From the garden I've harvested the first of the roses - had been hoping for more, but the buds are still pretty tightly furled on most of them, so I will just have to be patient and wait for the rosy show to swing into action over the next couple of weeks.

Also picked lots of the smaller foxgloves - I find that the giants are just too big to do much with on a domestic scale of flower arranging. The ammi is looking lacy and lush, so have frothy buckets of this and the deadly ground elder flower - so pretty. Can't wait to use them to make some bunches for my stall tomorrow.  Wafts of gin-scented angelica keep hitting my nostrils, so I hope they continue to smell this delicious tomorrow.

Colour has been provided by sky blue anchusa and the last of the centaurea flowers, cerise flat button-heads of knautia macedonica and some elegant wands of blue iris.

This flower arranging lark really is a labour of love - have spent ages cutting and conditioning this evening and have to get up at the crack of dawn to put them all together into bunches to sell.

And so to bed...

On trial

A few months ago, Sarah Raven's website put out a call for bloggers to trial packets of seed, so I duly put in for a free packet of her dark cut flower mixture.  The main reason I went for this particular selection was that I have not been able to buy cosmos bipinnatus 'Dazzler' anywhere locally, and this was listed as a key ingredient of the seed mix, along with mammoth dill and scabious atropurpurea 'Black Cat'.  A fine sounding list of names at any rate.

I've been waiting and waiting for the right opportunity to get these seeds into the soil - but it's either been the case that the soil hasn't been warm enough or moist enough to put them in.  Or, I have to confess, I missed a few chances because I'd planted out other seedlings into patches I'd previously earmarked to sow the dark mix into...

On the packet the instructions read 'Sow March to May' but I didn't fancy its chances earlier in the year in this, officially, the sixth coldest UK spring on record.  Even now, temperatures are not reliably warm, but we are reaching the end of the planting window and I'm away next week.  So.... it was down to the allotment to clear and weed a 2 metre squared bed and in with the seeds.  I can now sleep easily, knowing that they are finally sown!  I look forward to meeting them when they are grown ups.

Cosmos bipinnatus 'Dazzler'. Why is this gorgeous selection no longer widely available from the main seed suppliers?

Dahlia day. Taking the plunge.

A container grown dahlia from sunnier years. Will they grow well in 2013 if it ever warms up?

Braved the intermittent hail storms  (it's May for heaven's sake) to visit to the allotment this morning.  My mission?  To plant out a selection of dahlias in my rose and cutting flower bed.  This bed was well manured earlier in the year, so they should have plenty to feed on.  I'm currently out of organic mollusc repellents, so am simply hoping they can fend of the evils until I have time to buy more. The last slug treatment I bought was some wool-based pellets but I have to say that for the price, they don't really go far, as they need to be spread in a fairly thick, wide band around the plant that they are protecting.  They also leave you smelling like a sheep. Think I'll stick to wool foraging on walks in future.

At home, I've re-homed some dahlias into the garden borders, yanking out drifts of forget me nots to reveal planting pockets.  I've still got about 12 more plants to find homes for, so am waiting with my trowel poised for the first signs of weakness in any current border inhabitants.  Leggy lavenders watch out, your days are numbered.

I am quite excited about the prospect of mid- and late-summer flowers as I have not previously grown dahlias in any quantity, or, I have to say, with massive success - but the size of some  my 'Rip City' plants still takes my breath away. I had to pot them on into large plastic tubs usually used for storage as I didn't have any plant pots wide enough. Surely even the hungriest of slugs doesn't have sufficient appetite to decimate something that size!

The plants have all been well hardened off for the past couple of weeks, so the current chill in the air should not be too much of a shock to their system.  With them planted out, I can at least now get in and out of the greenhouse without fear of upsetting a crowd of Witteman's Best, Peaches, Purple Gem, Tahoma Star or Rip City.  They were starting to look quite tough and intimidating.

I hope the plants all romp away, but if they get munched and collapse or are otherwise dismal, I can always call on supplies from Dahlia Dave.  Dahlia Dave came to my rescue for a friend's wedding a couple of years ago as he grows them in abundance at both his allotment plot and back garden at home.  Have I got the knack this year or not? I'll let you know as time goes by.

 

Progress report.

I keep looking at the garden and wondering when things will really turn towards the growing season. The tulips and alliums are slowly emerging, buds are on the spirea and the lungworts bravely having a go at flowering and the ground elder is coming back to say hello.

Here and there, a few patches of self-sown seeds (weeds?) are germinating, so even though it feels subzero, I guess things must be warming up slightly.  Not so much that my hesitant hellebores have dared to open the buds which they've been holding for a month, however.

Tomorrow is farmer's market day, but thankfully not for me.  I still catch my breath in mild panic at the thought of filling a stall in April, especially looking at the low temperatures predicted for the next few weeks in long range forecasts. Will anything ever grow????

Keep trying to come up with resourceful ideas, and have made some dogwood wreaths with multi-coloured stems. Like my china finds, I fall in love with them and find myself reluctant to part with these little beauties and covet them for my own. Will have to train myself out of such tendencies pretty sharpish!!

On a bright (very bright) note, this week saw me organise market stall insurance, and take delivery of some packaging materials - small paper carriers in eye-pokey pink and equally vibrant tissue papers.  It is quite sad how excited I got about their arrival. Makes me feel like a kid playing at shop.   I've also ordered business cards and t-shirts so things feel like they are actually going somewhere now.

Spent this morning hiding in the greenhouse potting up my MASSIVE dahlia tubers (let's hope this bodes well for floriferousness - they are about twice the size of the tubers I've previously bought from garden centres). Seed sowing included cerinthe (to replace the lot which the cats knocked flying last week in their sneak greenhouse raid), heartsease violas and more stocks.  The stocks I sowed in the cold greenhouse are looking much more purposeful than the ones sown in heat, indoors, so will stick to a cold regime for those in future.  For the allotment, also potted up some broad bean seeds, but am running out of space so the rest will have to get sown direct into the soil next month with prayers for reasonable, seasonable weather.

I think I will feel much better about everything when the trees come into leaf and things really start to take off. Until that magical 'boing' moment, things feel like they are never going to to turn. Hurry up spring, I've got plants to plant.

Thank the Lord for IPhoto!

In view of the need to cut flowers in April, and feeling mild panic at the muddy expanse in front of me at the allotment today, I peered hopefully into the archive of IPhoto to see what has previously been in flower at that time of the year and found these little rays of hope (and suspiciously bright conditions - hope it isn't unremittingly wet this spring...)

Red parrot tulips

Honesty (purple), Japanese maple ' dissectum', forget me nots and artichoke foliage.

So let's hope the sun shines and my tulips perform well this year.  I love that purple and lime green combination in the photo above.  Have got lots of honesty seedlings spread around the place, so the sight of them makes me feel better.

Hipplecrips towards the future

"What's a hipplecrip?" you may ask.  In Derbyshire it's a tiny step made by putting one foot in front of the other, touching the heel of your leading foot against the toe of your back foot.  And these are what have been taken today.

The exciting news was getting my first farmer's market stall confirmed and discovering #britishflowers on Twitter.   

The feelings of delight on getting my stall have been followed by mild panic, wondering what will be ready in April and whether it will be enough - May onwards will be abundant, but the weather is such a tricky beast in the meantime it could have a real bearing on what is ready for the first stall.

So with new resolve, today I followed my newly drawn hosepipe line and chopped out more border space for future planting. Very satisfying.  Large pile of cut turf now stacked, grass side down, underneath the pear tree, waiting to be recycled as top soil in 6 months time.  I always seem to have one of these heaps accumulating somewhere in the garden...

 Here's the path, where are the primroses?

Gone is the annoying patch of grass behind the tree. Revealed are the patches of rubble and old cherry tree root underlying bits of this border.  Tomorrow, the tackling  of these will be added to my jobs list. Along with getting serious compost, leaf mould and muck into the new border areas.  And getting to the allotment to do some proper work next week. (Why are good intentions always so frequent where that place is concerned?)

In the garden at home, I can see  glimmerings of white sheathed snowdrop buds appearing in the borders and the first tentacles of hellebore flower shoots are slowly probing their way out of the mud. But spring still seems such a way off with this muddy drabness all around.  Hard to believe this will all change in the next six to eight weeks (an undending source of annual satisfaction).  This is what I have to keep telling myself when I gulp at the thought of actually producing flowers to sell - things seem impossibly dead at the moment, but will not always be so.

I'm starting small, with one stall a month, just to see how things go and although my mind gets ahead of me with multiple markets and major flower undertakings, the reality is, thankfully, more modest.  So I'll just have to bear this in mind, take deep breaths, pull on my boots, pray for good weather and set to work...

The kindest cut

Inspired by getting my own straggly locks chopped off this morning, wielding my sharp secateurs and a disinfectant rag, I ventured into the thorny midsts of my roses today and took out all the lanky, dead and twiggy bits:  I want them to work hard for me in the cutting garden come early summer.

Most of my choices in the garden were made for glorious scent - the thing that turned me on to roses about 15 years ago. I was visiting a friend who suddenly exclaimed "Sniff that".  No, it wasn't anything more intoxicating than a beautiful white rose - and that was the start of my perfumed rose addiction.

I started off with 'Gertrude Jekyll'  (even though I thought I was buying Constance Spry).

Rosa 'Gertrude Jekyll'

She's beautifully perfumed and flowers well but does get a bit leggy and straggly so I had to reduce her height by about a third this afternoon. Sorry Gertrude, but you'll thank me for it later, I hope.  Growing at the back of the border, climbing up an obelisk,  the lower growing peonies and hardy geraniums hide her naked legs, and it's good to have her pink blossoms giving height to the overall scheme.

A later purchase delivered a  'Constance Spry' to keep Gertrude company in the same stretch of border. I cut this one back quite a lot last year without any loss of flower power, and as a result have slightly less work to do on the pruning front this year.

Rosa 'Constance Spry"

I'm always slightly tentative about cutting back Old English type David Austin roses as I don't want them to lose their relaxed, arching habit.  This same habit, however, does mean that for arranging they are best cut on a shorter stems as they tend to droop with their thinner stems and large, heavy flowers.  Or you can support them in denser arrangements with your filler flowers as below:

Here, they're arranged with my yellow floribunda rose 'Absolutely Fabulous' which lived up to its name from June to November with amazing repeat flowering despite the pouring rain. The deep pink rose pictured is a small shrub 'John Betjeman' which has fantastic colour but, like Ab Fab, little scent.  The jury is still out on this one as his stems are rather weak and spindly - the glorious colour, however, buys him another year of grace to see if he can merit his space with sturdier stalks after a prune.

My other loves are the petite Felicite Parmentier;  the most perfect shell pink cluster flowered rose with amazing scent, and Falstaff; another leggy scrambler of the deepest magenta hue and nostril-thrilling whiffage.

Felicite Parmentier

Falstaff and foxgloves

The harshest cut was today reserved for my newly planted hybrid teas.  I've cut the ones which weren't already shortened by the nursery to about half their previous size - want them to grow into nice sturdy plants with strong flower-bearing stems.  My new additions are Black Baccara and Peace roses - the former seems to be reliably dark and dusky. The latter, however, in the images I've seen, seems to vary wildly between pastel hued lemon/cream delicately fading to pink edges,  and horribly canary combined with  lipstick pink - so I'm waiting with bated breath to see how that one pans out.  Will keep you posted!

Can't wait for them all to put on a show for me come June and to breath those smells again.  (But before that will come their manure top dressing in spring - not quite so pretty...).

So what are you waiting for?  You can't do a lot else at this time of year.  Take up your secateurs, sturdy gloves and your tweezers for spike removal surgery afterwards.  Some time between now and the end of February, nip out between the showers and give your roses a prune.

For advice on rose pruning, check out the Royal Horticultural Society website

October jobs

Time to plan ahead for next year and maximising cutting garden space. So.... the short-lived beauty of my rambling rose does not make it worth the vast (and lethally thorny) space it takes up.  It is on my list of things to axe but not until I have found the best spike-proof gloves.

Am also going to cull the large patches of hardy geraniums, but at least now I have control of the school garden, I can donate them to the bare borders there and get divisions of them in future, should I want them back.  The same goes for the ferns which have got HUGE and for the lysimachia  which has outspread its welcome.

Anemone corms are soaking on my worktop ready for planting tomorrow, and Parkers bulb catalogue is awaiting my next decisive moment...  Looking forward to a better growing year next year - weather permitting.