Archives: journal

I finally captured a furry friend, just for Ternie. His parents, brothers, sisters, aunts uncles and cousin are out of shot having a free meal on my Borders!! There quite partial to Cone Flowers (Echinacea) at the moment amongst other things, but this chap is happy with grass only for a little while.

Pity I don’t have some ducks as its great weather for them!! What do you do with Three caged up six year olds with there face pressed against the window asking if the trampoline/sandpit/playhouse is dry so the can go out and play? By the way I’ve put some new photos up on my Photo section, under Looking Good now July 2009.

Bill

Here is the Cerinthe you gave me and philastine that I am I just plonked it straight in the ground and it just took off, it is quite big now, I will put more photos in a July Album.   I will keep you some seeds for next year, just throw them in the ground though and don’t mollycoddle them!!   I love your baby Musa Rubra – did you say one had my name on it???

I bought a viburnum bukwoodii in a garden centre at the weekend.  In the pot were about 3 suckers of a different type of shrub.  While I was at the garden centre I thought it was the oak leaved hydrangea but now I’m not so sure.  Does anyone have any ideas?

Hello everyone,

I have recently been up to Braemar in Scotland before my next big op, the weather was fabulous, hot and very sunny, the week before it had been wet and cold. The hotel was gorgeous and my lovely man had booked a superior room with a view unbeknown to me, I do feel lucky in some ways, We went to Balmoral but the Queen is not there until August, it was lovely and peaceful and the gardens were superb (see album for photos) We visited other places in the area and all in all just what I needed. The peace and quiet on an evening was great to just sit outside with a few guinness. We went for a long walk around the river and saw lots of wildlife, oystercatchers, gulls, sheep and lovely butterflies.  Need to lose a bit of weight after all the breakfasts.

My garden is looking great too and the weather here in recent days has been too hot to be in the garden for long. My roses are in bloom and smell lovely, and a great show of my fuchsia’s this year too. We have alot of brambles which I have been cutting down today and trying to get tidied up.

 

 

 

Well, what can I say? This morning I could have done with a loan of Noah’s Ark to get down to the end of the garden. Total washout with thunder and lightning all night and torrential rain. ‘And the animals went in, two by two.’ I hope that includes frogs. Ha ha.

It didn’t stop raining until 5 o’clock when  I finished work. Now the sun is shining so innocently. Who would believe the weather we had earlier. Nothing done in garden this evening. Just testing moisture content of soil. Not a very good start to July. God love the kids on holidays.

While tending to the indoor plants today (during the floods) I discovered 2 geraniums that a customer just dumped in behind a calathea. They had totally dried out. Put them out in the rain all day. By the time I was clocking out they had fully recovered. But I reduced them from €7.99 to €3. And I wasn’t greedy. I only took 1. It was Geranium pratense ‘Midnight Reiter’. Lovely dark foliage and blue flower.

These dainty little star shaped flowers are a delight to behold!  They look like jewels with the translucent centre to the flower.  I can see why it is called the wax flower.  However I can’t take any credit for the flowering of this plant as I think the buds were on it when Nadine gave it to me.  I am proud that I mananged to keep it alive long enough to flower, as I have not had huge success with houseplants in the past.  I will be giving this one lots of TLC though!

I made a comment on Ternie’s journal back in April about Cosmonaut’s Day, saying that my son Eoin was obsessed with space and enjoyed seeing the photo of Yuri Gagarin in Olga’s journal.  He actually knew who he was already, as one of his favourite bedtime stories is his how things work book and his favourite pages in it are about space and the first man in space.  With the 4oth anniversay of the First man on the moon coming up its quite topical!  So Olga got back to me one day saying she had found some space themed stamps and she asked if we would be interested in them.  I said ‘absolutely’ and today a fantastic parcel arrived from Russia with an album full of pictures that Olga had put together about all the Russian space achivevements – the first man in Space – Yuri Gagarin, the first woman in space, the first satelite in space – Sputnik I, and lots, lots more.  Eoin was so thrilled he said it was the best day in his life! Thank you so much Olga.

this hosta, well there’s about 5 of them here, is recovering from being completely overtaken by a rampant geranium (tall, nice pink flowers). the geranium had all flowered so i cut them back to ground level leaving the hosta to breathe again. last summer i dug up some of the new geranium plants that had self-sown to give to my sister and completely forgot about them. they were left lying out the back, completely exposed for weeks on end. when i eventually planted them for her they were unrecogniseable but this year they are as nice and healthy as my own.

i’m trying to build up a list of names of the plants i dont know in my garden so if you know the name to the geranium or the hosta i’d be grateful. i think the hosta is h.elegans.

 

interestingly when i was researching this i found that the hosta is a member of the lily family and i only noticed that i have both hostas and lilies in the photo. 

after applying the fertiliser to the lawn about 2 weeks ago i took this photo to show how its doing. its a really dark green and looks lush.

don’t mind the brown spots….some of the fertiliser fell out of the bag in lumps as i was hauling it across the lawn and it  scorched it but it will come back

My Oriental Lilies beside the pond have opened, and I am not exaggerating they are twice the size of any lilies I have ever grown or seen (I must measure one this evening), they would be the size of my two hands put together. I am definitely going to invest in more, even the scent is fantastic, I had to stake them because the flowers are so big and there are loads of buds, I dont want the stem to break.  I dont think the picture does justice to the size of the flowers, my dad was in amazement he asked had I been feeding them, it must be all the rain.

Sun shine this morning. I used the watering can to put blight liquid on my small amount of spuds. I hate spraying. An azalea and trumpeter rose, which were performing very badly, were moved to new spots. I know this is a very bad time to move things but I don’t have patience to wait. I made sure I dug well away from the roots. This made them quite heavy to dig up………..but I don’t let that defeat me……. The pink Alstroemeria was looking gorgeous this morning.

To anyone going to Helens don’t miss going to the loo…….Helen will tell you to go anyway………… She has a right to be proud of the small room. Have a look! Also album

Spurred on by a message from a fellow Garden.ie member I have uploaded some new pictures of my garden from the last few weeks.  One set is dedicated to the deck that I have been working on since last year.  The base is down thanks to some help from friends and in a few minutes I am off to Balbriggan to look at some Garapa hardwood decking boards which seem to be very reasonably priced at the moment.  Once I get them the fun part will start and hopefully by next Friday 10th the whole thing will be finished.  I have set that date for its completion because my wifes sister is coming home from Honduras (yes thats the military coup place and yes she lives in the capital!) for a week so I want us all to be able to use it then.

The second set of photographs is just random ones from the garden, more of which I will upload in the coming days as I have to head off now.

Looking forward to Mullingar, hope to see you all there, or at least some of you!

 

Ronan

Our neighbours had a baby girl yesterday evening. 

A bonny healthy baby girl. This little girl is especially welcome as her baby brother Rafael died before he had the chance to look at his Mommy and Daddy for the first time last year.

They will be calling her Tala Maeve. Tala is the Phillipino word for Star.  I wanted to buy a tree or shrub for our little star that would be in flower for her birthday 2nd July but that is also named after her.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

this is corsican mint.  it has the smallest blue flower I have ever seen and when touched emits a minty fragrance.  It clings tightly and covers everything with a close knit lovely green carpet.  this died out over winter but regrew so not sure if it seeded or just regenerated from root.

One of Conor’s songs is "Beautiful Haze "which has a line – Looking through my window pane and when I took this photo from the house across the bed on the NW side, I thought of his song.

The weather has been very changeable with heavy downpours especially at night, everything appreciated the rain and looking down to the Kitchen Garden I can see that it really is taking off. The rain has also brought on the weeds and unfortunately the roses and peony have surffered so I will have to spend a bit of time  tidying up – hope Sunday will be a good day as this will be the earliest I’ll get time to spend in the garden. The heavy rain has risen the pond a few more inches now that the run off  has been sealed off.

Hope that the weather improves as tomorrow we have about 150 people who are riders and friends for a BBQ and MGRB are going to play.Monday sees the start of Monaghan Pony Club camp which I teaching at and then the 12th we are running the first of horse trials so the garden is going to get little attention for the next week or so.

I had a day off today and headed for Wexford. A friend had told me about The Potting Shed just outside Camolin and was I glad I went. There sitting on a plant tray was Geranium ‘Patricia’ as if waiting for me, so needless to say I had to have it. Susan who runs the place is a fund of information.

I then made my way to The Bay Garden just down the road on the N11. What a beautiful garden set about an old farmhouse and outbuildings. When you enter through the small gateway you come upon a wonderland of garden rooms. There is an amazing collection of hardy geraniums with different varieties popping up here and there throughout the garden. I ended up in the wooland garden and down at the bottom of it was this lovely gazebo you see in the photo, surrounded by an amazing collection of Irises, A sight for sore eyes. I forgot my camera so the attached photo was taken with my phone.

From here I made my way to Kilmurray Nurseries outside Gorey on the Ballymoney road. This is a very well set out nursery with a wonderful selection of very healthy plants. Not surprised they were awarded a Gold Medal by the RHS. I treated myself to a very nice Dierama which hopefully will do well for me.

All in all a very nice day out.

 

 

Productive  day in work.  Big delivery came in. Hebes are big in our garden centre this summer. Selling extremely well. And Fuchsias. Our biggest seller in Hebes is ‘Black Beauty’. Lovely Heuchera came in, lime green/yellow. Was tempted.

I have a triangular bed that needs total re-planting. Cant decide what I want in it. But tomorrow I am going remove everything that’s in it. At the moment I have paeony, Rodgersia (totally in the wrong place), Campanula, Sedum spectabile, and Fatsia japonica, Arum lily, primula vialii, aubretia etc. Maybe I could just plant up different grasses. I like things swaying in the breeze and I could afford to plant tallish varieties. Or maybe I could put in a few small shrubs like Hebes. Its only about 7ftx7ftx 14ft. Right now it’s a mess. And full of weeds.

Got home from work and Steve, even though he was off sick with a bad back, had the edging of the alpine bed finished. Lovely. I’ll show ye a pic. I think I should put more alpines in it. But maybe I feel that way because I’m so used to just cramming loads in. I’m trying to discipline myself. Tell me what you think please. I should just give it all time to grow, but to me, it just looks empty.  It’s extremely difficult. Did loads of dead-heading when I got home. Steve had everything watered.

Unbelievable, after writing a few days ago here that my dierama has not flowered for 4 or 5 years, this morning I was looking at it and noticed that there are indeed flowers coming out of the main stem this year. They must have just appeared yesterday! Perhaps the sunnier weather recently has made the difference… I think I will still move it to a sunnier spot anyway but I am not touching it for now!

The dwarf callistemon started flowering too, just one flower so far but this year it looks promising as I see a lot of buds ready to open. After neglecting it a little the previous couple of years – it is in a large pot – , I was much more careful this year, watered it regularly when it is hot, and also gave it some plant food, and it seems to have paid off so far.

I went for a little trip to the Avoca nursery last week-end with my mum (nearest to my house with the Woodies nursery) and she bought me two Salvia patens, which I planted in two large pots. One started flowering and the flowers are a really nice blue… (July 09 album)

And indoors, the orchids seem to be happier in the room I moved them (a south facing room, where they are not in full sun but get lots of light and where the temperature is warm). One is sending new roots and the other one seems to be growing a flower stem. And another one downstairs is definitely growing a branch off the main flower stem, so hopefully we will see some flowers soon.