What are we doing in the garden 2025

Shotgun?



In that kind of heat, @CanadianLori, your sun-lovers might be grateful for the newly acquired shading.

 

@On the Levels Afriend of mine gave me a recipe for making damson and wheat wine. A different friend gave me enough to make 5 gallons. It was potent stuff but tasted wonderful, i havent made wine for many years. Is fig wine a possibility?

 

Mowed the weed stalks which is the only bit of the back lawn growing , the grass is crisp like paper underfoot. I was going to do the 8:8:8 pruning of lavender which i have done for the south facing stuff but the east/west is still full of bees and butterflies although well past its best. Give it another week.
Took a load of heuchera cuttings . Plants were looking quite messy and once this heatwave has passed i will just cut the rest back and compost the trimmings.
Got the hedgetrimmer out - neighbour had trimmed our boundary hedge between us on the top very neatly but that left the adjoining part of my hedge looking a right mess so i trimmed the scraggy bits on the top. I can see the other side of the hedge needs doing so thats a job for today and access it all from the field. The flamingo willow also looks scraggy so i will sort that too before putting the trimmer back in the rafters

 

That's a pity about your Fatsia @ViewAhead . I get some brown spotting every year on a few leaves, but otherwise, they're no problem. I have one in a corner at the shed, and it's ideal for that site as it rarely gets any sun.
I did plenty of painting yesterday, and got a bit carried away with it. Not like me at all....
It was a tad windy, so it kept me out of trouble. Plenty of hooks/screws put up for tools and bits and pieces. The wee window needs cleaned, and then I might be able to see out of it - past all the spiders' webs!
Other than that, the usual deadheading, and moved a couple of pots around. The cornflowers have been a bit poor, which is annoying, but that's how it is. Fixed up the little feeder I'd made when we'd had a woodpecker visiting last year. They rarely come in the garden as there's plenty of habitat nearby. Typically, it never appeared again after I'd done it, but one came in the other day, so I sorted it and put it up. That means it won't come back...
My grass might get cut today - I have the opposite problem to you @Robert Bowen. Lots of green stuff, and the warmer than usual temps of late mean that it's growing rapidly. There's rain forecast for tonight, so it would be ideal to get it done later on. I could also do with hedgetrimming a bit of stuff on the fence nearest my car, so that's a possibility, but I think I might have to tackle the wobbly post there instead...

 

I have just deadheaded my Lucifer. I have been watching my lavender to see if the bees have finished visiting it, then I must give it its annual haircut, also the senecio. The water forget me not also needs similar treatment.

 

I've given a couple of osteospermums a hard prune. Feel very guilty doing it as it removes some buds and lots of healthy greenery, but if I don't, next yr they will be impossibly leggy.

Am sad about my Fatsia, @fairygirl. It has been a beautiful plant. I got it for 50p. It was about 8cms tall with one leaf in a split plastic pot. It grew to about 4m x 4m and has been no bother at all.

 

@shiney we have also had issues with branches from apples and pears being broken. Down to the weight of the fruit but also just no rain. You have managed to collect a huge harvest but we aren't sure whether to harvest the fallen fruit as it seems to be so early....but then everything is out of what it should be.

 

@Robert Bowen Don't know about fig wine but surely all fruit can be wined. Thanks, I will look into it.
Thankfully our son left this morning with many gages and figs so not so many but still too many and yet more on the trees.
Still have empty demijons so the possibility is there.

 

Pulling weeds.

 

clearing shed out and cutting hedge. too hot now so off indoors.

 

@On the Levels Let us know how you get on. My dad used to make mixed dried fruit wine . It looked revolting when it was fermenting but made a lovely warming golden wine . Hopefully you will fill your demijohns with great promise coupled with those lovely plopping airlock sounds .

 

Earlier on in the year I widened a border in my front garden to introduce some colour. It’s been disappointing due to the dry weather, despite my frequent watering. The annual Salvias have stopped flowering and gone over, the dahlias have been battered by wind, the Hakonechloa looks decidedly unwell but at least the three Heucheras have survived. I removed the Salvias yesterday, pruned off the damage to the dahlias and deadheaded them, dug the border over and gave it a thorough watering. I also drenched the box hedging with diluted seaweed extract which seems to help to keep it green. There is a large Phormium in a corner which has routinely swept all the bark off the border onto the lawn and path in the wind, so I removed a lot of the lower damaged and discoloured leaves and raked all the bark back into place. The lawn is still looking parched but at least there’s no moss or weeds. Good that I can’t see the front garden from the house, only when I go out of the front door or garage .

 

The usual, watering and weeding- I did the ladylike weeding parts by elegantly bending slightly to pull offenders from my containers, and The Child dug the hard stuff out with a fork.

Harvested colourful posh carrots (only half to be used as the we are not the first eaters of the other half), kohlrabi, celery, toms and either a chilli or a sweet pepper for our evening meal.

I like my sweet peppers small and my chillies big and fleshy, which creates a tad of a challenge

After The Child suggested I might want to grow a rambler rose around the French window, I did some measuring and some daydreaming and decided that the spot can actually accommodate one of the 45cm terracotta pots I have.

A rambler is not for me, but a climbing Rose might be a temptation... The wall faces South so anything must be very, very draught tolerant.

How lovely to have dilemmas like this, and no deadline to solve them.

Oh, I also shamelessly stole some water Mint from a nearby pond and put it in a jar to see if it roots. It could be quite nice in my pond I think.