June already then, that went fast. It is nice to have the long light evenings. As I write this on Friday evening I note I still have muddy fingers from planting out a few things at 8:30pm. I have been off work this week, there has been much pottering. As fast as I remove plants from the greenhouse and try to find somewhere to plant them, I am adding more in. It’s never ending. Entirely my own fault, of course…

Time for Six on Saturday. Six things, in the garden, on a Saturday. Could be anything, a flower, a pest, a problem, a success, a job to do, anything at all. Join in!

Here are my Six for this week…

1 – Rose ‘Ali Baba’. This rose has come on leaps and bounds in just the last three months, topping out the six foot fence against which it is growing. There are lots of thick new stems that will need training in over the winter. A little part of me is keen to do it now but I will wait until I can see what I’m doing.

2 – Summer bedding plugs. I was unable to resist a significant price reduction to just a fiver for 72 plugs. Obviously I bought 3 packs, more you spend, more you save. They arrived on Thursday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours potting them on into whatever modules I had spare, and when those ran out, 9 to a half seed tray. They are an assortment of gazania, lobelia, begonia, bacopa, petunias, busy lizzies, nicotiana – the usual suspects really. I’m hoping they will quickly grown on to a size worth planting out. They will mainly go into pots and containers I think.

3 – Geranium ‘Brookside’ and a friend. I think it’s Brookside, I don’t seem to have labelled it. I’ve added 5 or 10 geraniums a year the last two or three years. I like them a lot, they flower like crazy, the foliage is great, there’s a lot of variety in the forms and colours, and best of all they are unbothered by Messrs Slug and Snail.

4 – Alliums, various. It is at this time of year I always regret not having planted three or four times as many alliums as I actually did. I want to see them ebb and flow throughout every border. I mean the leaves are an utter disgrace, but we can forgive them that for the perky flowers and the decorative seed heads that follow.

5 – Iris versicolor. I grew these from seed a few years ago. They were getting swamped by taller plants so a month or so ago I moved them to a different spot. They have responded by sulking and not putting on much in the way of further growth. They are thus flowering quite low down, and yes, swamped by nearby plants. I tried.

6 – Rose/Clematis combination. This is Mme Alfred Carriere and Rebecca getting up to mischief, two naughty girls in the one container. For reasons best known to Rebecca, she is not reaching for the sky. I have one in the ground elsewhere in the garden that routinely gets to 8′ tall. In this incarnation she is stubbornly staying down below, so the colours aren’t mixing in quite the way I had hoped. It won’t matter for long as the earwigs will soon eat all the clematis flowers…

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. If you also mention my blog in yours that would be triffic. For more details you can read the brief participant guide.

Have a super gardening weekend, I hope you get done what you need to get done. I have a lot of planting still to do, that will be my main job this weekend. It’ll take a long time, there will be much pondering and hunting for hitherto unspotted, microscopically small spaces into which I might jam a plant.

Stay safe, I’ll be back next weekend with another #SixOnSaturday.