Don’t get me started

Weeds. Lusty plants popping up in the middle of steps shouting out ‘look at me, aren’t I clever? I grow a foot in the night and you never noticed.’

Well, I have been inattentive. Mostly because I am so in awe of my lovely santolinas to the right of these rickety steps.  But today I was doing a spot of planting: I have two dozen purple sage plants that I grew from cuttings in spring.  And they can’t stay in the luxury of the potting shed any longer.

I am shoving things out whether they are ready or not.  But to make space I seem to have to weed buckets and buckets of unwanted plants first.

And just looking up at these steps I could see that I would have spent a delightful hour pulling things out and putting to rights. But I don’t have time to day. It’s all about planting out. Not yanking out.

I have half a dozen of these sturdy shrubs – the santolinas, not the weeds – that I also grew from cuttings. And I want to repeat the effect further up the garden.

I have a tricky spot underneath the mirabelle plum trees that was mainly a home for brambles, suckering plum branches, self sown festuca glauca grasses, and not much else.

The one thing the flood did was force me to landscape this part of the garden rather than just ignore it.  So today out came most of the weeds and I have planted up purple sage, santolina, transplanted euhporbias and stachys.  I weeded the thymes which went in last November. And with a fair wind it all should knit together.  In a year.

But now that I study the pictures you can’t really see the difference between the before and after shots. Typical.  The plants are titchy, so I’ll have to come back in a few months to show the progress. I must mulch there too.

Back in the potting shed it was all hands in the compost as I did a rapid potting up of small seedlings. Here the runner bean Moonlight (fab, divine, tastes like french beans, grows like runner beans) and some courgette Defenders have been moved up a size (or two).

I wouldn’t normally be that brusque, but I will be away for ten days, and watering might be at the mercy of others, so I’d rather they wallowed in a bit of overwatering than die of thirst in pots too small.