welsh hills again

If you have been reading this blog for a while you may remember that last year I reviewed a variety of plants from Plant me Now , an online plant nursery.  The plants were always well grown and everything I had from them last year  has survived really well so I was very pleased to be asked to review some  perennials  for them this spring. I am on a bit of a mission to increase the number of perennials in my cutting garden.  I have so far relied heavily on annuals and grown most of them from seed.  This is fine when you have the time and attention to devote to seed raising but this year is not the year for that.  I can pretty much guarantee that if I disappear down to Devon  every couple of weeks for a few days things will die and I can do without that.  The garden has to sustain me this year and not be too hard work.  It has to be somewhere that restores and recharges my batteries (is that possible?  not looking to...

A bit of a family crisis whizzed me away for a few days.  I suppose this will happen from time to time now with my father's illness.  It is always hard to know whether the right thing to do is to drop everything and go or whether to sit it out up here.  This time I did drop everything and went and that was undoubtedly the right thing to do.  I ran around sorting things out and sat around keeping both my parents company and my sister and I shared some of the problems and felt, as always, how lucky we are to have each other.  I left still feeling I could stay and that there was more be done.  And now I am home again, feeling torn as ever, and also feeling out of touch with my normal life. Time to take stock of what has been happening in the garden. Just before I went I received another load of plants from Plant me Now, the online garden centre which has been asking me to test and review plants.  This time it is bedding plants, something I don't nor...

A couple of months ago a new web based garden centre, Plant me Now, asked me to be an Ambassador for them.  Since this involves being sent plants and reviewing them I hesitated for approximately no seconds at all.  I did say though that I would review the plants just as I found them and my first review, plants sold as annuals, although including some tender perennials went up here . The second delivery of plants from Plant me Now arrived while we were deep in snow.  Indeed we were so deep in snow that it was hard to see the greenhouse, never mind get into it.  So for a few days the plants sat in our tiny wooden lean to greenhouse up next to the house while we waited for at least some of the snow to melt.  They don't seem any the worse for having had to wait to be potted on! This time I had ordered perennials with the intention of putting some in the cutting garden, some in a new bed in the field which has amelanchier and dogwood in it and using some as bedd...

Like Helen and some others, I have been asked to be an ambassador for Plant me Now, a garden centre selling plants online .  This means being sent plants to review which is not a hardship!   Before I made up my mind I looked at their website and I liked the way it had been  put together, focussing very strongly at what to sow and plant at different times of year.  This knowledge is something you take for granted as a reasonably experienced gardener but chatting to my daughter in law, the proud owner of her first grown up sized garden, I was reminded that when you are starting out this is the kind of thing that you don’t know, or know in a patchy kind of way.  So it is a helpful and well thought out site which would be particularly useful to reasonably new gardeners but which I can also see myself using. The first lot of plants to come my way are annuals , seedlings started off early which come as generous sized plug plants.  I mused a bit as to ...