Bulb-planting season is here – and I’ve got plenty!
It’s daffodil planting time. As most of those I’m planting are relatively expensive show varieties, they’re all carefully labelled and planted in rows of seven bulbs in beds about 1.2m wide. The dormant bulbs all look the same, so I have to be careful not to get them mixed up. I keep a record of where each variety is planted in my daffodil book.
I grew a couple of varieties of potatoes this year. ‘Apache’ has a red-yellow coloured skin and ‘Gipsy Queen’ is similar, but more pinkyellow in colour. On boiling ‘Gipsy Queen’, it proved to be the best for eating. Tomatoes in the greenhouse are now ripening fast. I’ve removed some of the older bottom leaves so the fruit gets more light and air to promote ripening. They also get a weekly feed of liquid tomato fertiliser.
Sweet peas are still flowering and giving lots of cut blooms. The dahlias are now approaching peak flowering. I lightly disbud the flowering stems to give a longer stem for cut flowers. I’m very pleased with a new variety I got this year. It’s ‘Carol’s Spanish Dancer’, a small cactus with red florets that are white at the base. I grew love-in-amist (nigella) from seed this year. It flowered well in a large pot but I really liked the inflated seed pods among the tendril-like leaves. Streptocarpus, in a shady part of the greenhouse, responded well to repotting and an application of tomato fertiliser. They’re now flowering well. The white hesperantha (crimson flag lilies) are now just starting to flower. They’re planted at the side of the tunnel where they get lots of water run-off from the plastic roof. Persicaria runcinata ‘Purple Fantasy’ has responded well to my cutting it back. Cuttings root very easily and it makes an attractive foliage plant.
There’s been a clump of snowdrops growing at the side of my compost heap for a number of years. The number of flowers increases each year and they’re probably getting a good supply of nutrients leaking from the compost heap. While tidying round the compost area recently, I noticed some snowdrops near the surface. I dug up the clump and found I had over 200 bulbs, some of which were small. I replanted them in a row near the compost heap, giving them much more room to grow.
There are lots of delicate-looking harebells growing on the golf course near us. They seem to thrive on the light, impoverished soil on parts of this coastal golf course. They look very delicate but stand up well to rain and wind.
When I received a sweet pea seed catalogue recently, I was pleased to see a new sweet pea has been named ‘John Warren’. John was a local plantsman who exhibited a wide variety of flowers and vegetables here in Ireland. This white sweet pea is a nice tribute to John, who passed away last year.