In My Garden

I'm not sowing many seeds this year, in fact the only seeds I've bought are Tigerella tomato and sunflower Rouge Royale.

I always used to start my sowing much earlier than May but with a cold rainy April, I just couldn't motivate myself this year. In fact, I'm not even sure I'm going to sow the tomatoes as I saw that a local garden centre had some heritage tomato plants, I may pop back and buy a couple of those. There's so many interesting tomato varieties that it's nice to try something new.

We've done quite a bit of garden centre visiting just lately and we've made a few purchases too, they're not all shown here. The better weather has encouraged lots of garden activity. I've bought some plants to plug gaps in the flower border as well as others to put in pots. I'm not a huge lover of bedding plants but they have their place. We've also bought a tree, rowan Joseph Rock. Its leaves turn a flame red in autumn and it produces amber yellow berries. We've got an ornamental cherry tree in the front garden at the moment but it's diseased so we're going to replace it with this.

Mick bought me a plant stand for Christmas so I'm enjoying filling that with an assortment of different pots and plants. There's still space for more.

We've bought a few of these metal planters to hang on the fence. I've filled them with violas and lobelia as they'll be emptied at the end of summer and stored away to prevent them from rusting. Who knows, they may rust anyway being outdoors in our British summer. Time will tell.

Of course, if I'm trying to get some photos of the garden then Archie is going to photobomb them!

I have a few different areas in the garden where I group pots together. Here at the side of my bench I have an acer, a pieris, a pot filled with strawberry plants, a dahlia and a sedum.

We're lucky to have a nice outdoor space. I think many people came to realise during the pandemic that a garden can be a haven and though our garden is now smaller than the one we left behind two years ago, it's still a good sized space, big enough for us, and we enjoy being in it when the sun puts in an appearance.