Six on Saturday 05-01-2019

Happy New Year! It has finally turned a bit chilly here, hovering around freezing for the last couple of days. Are we finally seeing signs of the (annually!) predicted severe winter? As I write this on Friday afternoon, it’s a beautiful day out, I’m hoping for more of the same at the weekend. Talking of weekends, it’s time for Six on Saturday – Six things, in the garden now-ish, on a Saturday. Could be anything – a flower, a job to do, a tool, a gadget, anything at all. Join in!

Here are my Six.

1 – Onion seeds sown. Remember this module tray from a week or two ago? I cut it in half and in a fit of impatience have sown this year’s onion seeds. Three kinds, Bedfordshire Champion, Red Baron and Red Brunswick. I’ve sown a few seeds in each one, I’ll either plant out as a group or perhaps thin out to one per module. The tray is sitting in the heated bench for now, I’ll move it on into the unheated parts of the greenhouse once they’ve germinated.

2 – Geranium ‘salome’. Among the batch of teeny perennials plants I bought last year were six of these, supplied as bareroots of a decent size. I have planted them up in 1L pots and the new growth is beginning to come through. ‘Salome’ is fairly low growing and liable to run or clamber through neighbouring plants, mauve-pink flowers with magenta/black tracery. Like many hardy geraniums, ‘Salome’ is happy in full sun or partial shade. Looking forward to it.

3 – UFO sighting. I was given a set of LED grow lights for Christmas. This is either a sad reflection of the state of things (rest of family), or an excellent gift (me), depends entirely on one’s perspective! At the moment I have this rigged up in the greenhouse, just to try them out. I have them on a timer from 07:00 to 22:00. This particular set does not cover a large area, but is enough to light one end of my heated bench. The spectrum of light provided is a mix of red and blue, supposedly supporting seeds/seedlings in one case, growing plants in the other. We’ll see. I might need another one or two.

4 – Linaria, toadflax. It’s slim pickings at this time of year, but toady here caught my eye. This is the end of one of several stems on this plant.

5 – Plant supports. A few weeks back I mentioned I had bought some coppiced stems with the intention of making some plant supports, along the lines of some that I’d seen at Waterperry in Oxfordshire. This is the result of my fiddling about. If I’ve done it right, this should support a large clump of helenium which last year got to about 6′ tall.

6 – Trachelospermum jasminoides. I bought this as a teeny little plant last winter. It has grown on quite nicely and is now in one of the planters down the side of the house. I need to start training it in to the wall. In time this should grow to cover a good chunk of wall. I am hoping it will make a good pairing with the rose ‘Claire Austin’ as they both have white flowers and a good fragrance.

Those are my Six, what are yours? Join in, do! Just publish your post then pop a link to it in the comments below, maybe mention my blog in yours, job’s a good’n. For more details and for other ways to take part, you can read the brief participant guide.

Have a super weekend, I hope you are able to get some gardening done, even if it is simply drooling over seed catalogues. Don’t forget to check in later on as more links get added during the day.

I’ll be back next week with another #SixOnSaturday.