Six on Saturday 02-02-2019

The weather strikes back! We had a little snow last week that quickly cleared, then we had about 3 inches more snow on Thursday night, following the coldest night of the year so far, and the coldest for a number of years. My photos this week thus mostly involve a certain amount of the cold stuff. Time for Six on Saturday then. Six things, in the garden, on a Saturday. Could be anything – a tool, a pest, a flower, emerging growth, a job to do, anything at all. Join in!

Here are my Six for this week…

1 – New growth, Rosa ‘The Pilgrim’. A while back I bought three new David Austin roses, this is one of them. It probably won’t do an awful lot this year, but I’ll be happy if I can train a few stems onto the wires, a framework for next year’s growth. If I’m lucky I’ll also get a few flowers this year. This one is yellow (the rose, not the snow…) and has a good fragrance too, if I remember rightly.

2 – Beasties on my chillies. A week or two back I included my overwintering chilli plants here. Today I noticed some odd dust at the base of the plant. Strange, thought I. The first picture gave some clues. Does dust normally have legs?

On closer inspection, it’s a veritable menagerie of critters. Not sure what the white ones are – larval form of the other? Look like greenfly to me, but perhaps not. Either way they are living on borrowed time. When clearing up the shed the other day I found a bottle of organic bug spray. I don’t seem to have ever used it, so now is the time to find out if organic = effective. I will engage in chemical warfare, albeit nice lentilly organic chemicals. Magic moonbeams, or whatever it contains.

3 – Nandina domestica. Not its first #SixOnSaturday rodeo, but the berries looked nice and bright against the melting snow.

4 – Salvia ‘amistad’, a cutting of a cutting. I had these under the spooky growlights in the greenhouse. I moved this one and a bunch of other recent cuttings to unheated staging in the greenhouse, I needed the space for seed pots and for some recently potted cuttings. These seem happy enough, although I am reminded that they probably need a bit of a feed.

5 – Wallflowers. One of only a few that survived being planting out. The survivors seem vigorous enough, and don’t seem to have minded being snowed on that much. I forget what varieties I bought, and even if I had remembered, I forget which pots I planted which varieties in. I recall purple, white and maybe yellow as colours, but I guess we’ll find out a few months down the road.

6 – Snow to be cleared. The greenhouse is partly sheltered under the neighbour’s oak tree, but the snow has anyway accumulated to a degree. It was melting a little, so unless we get more, hopefully this will all be gone by Saturday morning. If not, I’ll sweep it all off at some point during the day.

Those are my Six, what are yours? If you’d like to join in, just publish your post and pop a link to it in the comments below. For more details and other ways to participate, have a read of the brief participant guide.

Have a great gardening weekend, even if that just means curling up in the warm with some seed catalogues, and don’t forget to check back in as more links are added during the day.

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