In the cutting garden

Now that’s the perfect start to the day. I oozed down to the potager with my second best secateurs and a large bucket of water.  Artur likes to come and inspect my work and drink from the bucket before I dump a huge number of flowers into the water and make him cross.

He is very, very skinny now poor little cat.  I keep looking at him and wondering if this is his last summer.

And this terrible sentiment means that getting everything done goes so much more slowly as he wants a lap sit. So I oblige.  I can’t work out where he is snoozing in the daytime right now, so I also waste a bit of time wandering about and wondering where he is.

You get into a routine with a cat and when they change their habits it is most discombobulating.

I loved it when he chose to sleep on the potting shed roof – I could keep an eye on him without having to go hunting in the undergrowth.

I hope he will mooch over early evening and then I won’t fret.

But back to the good stuff. Lots of flowers to make lots of bouquets today. Dahlias and cosmos.

Some stonking zinnias. I love how stiff the stems are. Much better than the beautiful orange Tithonia Torch I grew for a few years.  The colour was fantastic. They grew to a huge height. But their stems were so fragile that they rarely made it to the vase.

And I’m delighted to see the agastache has come up.  That’s the korean mint which I love. I sowed lots more little plants from seed earlier in the spring and planted them out at the very bottom of the cutting flower bed.  I am hoping they will bulk up with the extra watering these beds receive. And reward me with perfect blue purple flowers.  Another good upright plant.

I have even decided that I don’t need any extra greenery in the vases this week – just oodles of flowers and using the agastache and the flowering marjoram as the softening green.

Oh, and the wacky asparagus ferns. That loosens up the bouquets so much they look chaotically messy.

I have lots of lilies in the house too – but you have had a surfeit of blooms this week, so I will spare shots of those.