Six on Saturday 21-09-2019

This week it has been more or less dark when I leave the house and dark when I get home, so I haven’t inspected the estate as much as usual.  It has been sunny and dry for quite a while now, certainly there hasn’t been any useful rain for a couple of weeks. When I popped out to the garden yesterday lunchtime to take these photos, I was a horrified to see the veg plot is pretty parched, I haven’t watered it since last weekend. I hope it can hang on until I get the chance to give it a good soak today. Until then, time for Six on Saturday. Six things, in the garden, on a Saturday. Could be anything – a harvest, a job to do, a success, a failure, a flower, a pest, anything at all. Join in!

Here are my Six for this week…

1 – Begonia. I bought a few of these years ago, expecting them to get frosted and die off the first winter. Most did, but this one plant stubbornly refuses to take the hint.  It is in the corner of a planter on the patio and it comes back every year. This year it has flowered later than usual but is making up for lost time now.

2 – Aster Novae-Angliae ‘St Michael’.  Last October we visited Waterperry Gardens near Oxford. It was lovely, but their impressive aster display had just gone over. In a fit of disappointment I bought a couple from the shop, including this one. It is a good 5′ tall with nice sturdy stems. There are a lot of flower buds yet to break, but it has started up. I will, of course, be taking basal cuttings in the spring.

3 – Cosmos seedhead. I have not been keeping up with my deadheading, a weekly job that could do with being daily at the moment.  On the plus side, my laxness means I have seeds to collect. The parent plants were grown from seeds in the RHS member’s seed scheme, collected from an RHS garden somewhere. They have been great plants this year so I am hoping for big things from the stash of seeds I am building up. I need to grab these today before they fall off.

4 – Chilli numex pinata.  I’m happy to say I have had a bumper crop of chillies this year.  Last year wasn’t terrible, a single full tub in the freezer. This year I have 5 tubs in the freezer so far, with plenty more to come. I am thus faced with the joy of figuring out what to do with them all, as this far exceeds my “business as usual” consumption rate. I expect this group will have some ideas! This is one of 5 or 6 varieties I am growing this year. They are a variety of jalapeno, apparently.

5 – Trollius yunnanensis, yunnan globeflower. I grew these from seed this year, they are still in their 1L pots in the holding area. It supposedly flowers in the spring, so I’m not sure what it’s up to. It forms a good clump, the foliage is good, quite like a geranium, with the flowers borne on longish stems above. It is hardy, prefers soil that doesn’t dry out and is happy in full sun or partial shade. I have just the spot for them.

6 – Tomatoes, not sure which, possibly gardener’s delight.  Last year I had a crushing tomato disapppointment, despite my watering brainwaves. This year the plants have been good, I have kept up with the watering and feeding, but they were slow to set fruit. Having been educated in the mysteries of tomato pollenation, they began to set fruit, but it has been slow to ripen. A bit of September sunshine has been enough to bring them on and I’ll be able to pick some this weekend I think. I think the greenhouse is a little shaded. The patio is a better spot, it’s a real suntrap, but in recent years any tomatoes grown there have succumbed to blight.  I might treat myself to one of those plastic mini-greenhouse, or maybe bodge one together myself, to keep them somewhat sheltered.

Those are my Six, what are yours?  If you’d like to join in, just publish your Six post and pop a link to it in the comments below. If you also mention and link to my blog in yours, that would be fab. For more information you can read the brief participant guide.

Have a fabulous gardening weekend, don’t forget to check back in during the day as more links get added.

Finally, in a few weeks I’m running in a half marathon to raise money for the RNIB. If you’d like to donate a small amount you can do via this link.

I’ll be back next weekend for another #SixOnSaturday.