Tag: Marigold

Focus thistles

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We’ve taken to calling this area of the garden the “focus area” as it’s the only area of the garden I’m actively trying to keep clear. Daily I’m out here plucking grass or other weeds I don’t recognise. And still they come.

But we’re not talking about weeds today, I want to show off how great these globe thistles are! Theres three in this picture. The two left most are standing tall. The right most one is a bit squashed due to a fallen bird (a sad story for another time, maybe). They’re shooting right up and I couldn’t be more pleased.

The lavender you see there is neither dying nor growing. I’d really love to dig it up again and see if it’s bothered taking root or if it’s still kept itself pot bound.

Also in focus are some marigolds that have managed to stand themselves up. These haven’t grown anywhere near the speed that the greenhouse one have. They’ve mostly filled out, rather than growing upwards, which is fine by me.

Reaching the glass ceiling

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(More plastic ceiling, honestly.)

Remember a while ago I started planting some seedlings into pots? It looks like they’re just about out growing my single level greenhouse.

You can see them here pushing right up against the plastic. Being in that much contact with the wet surface probably isn’t good for them, so my next project will have to be graduating them to big plant school; the soil.

  • One of the nasturtium, looking a bit floopy.
  • Unflowering marigolds

Many of the nasturium look like this. Long, with very few off shoots. I’ve no idea if this is their natural look, or a symptom of miniture greenhouse growth. Nonetheless, I’ve given it a deep drink of water that’ll hopefully allow it to perk up.

The marigolds are looking brilliant. I’ll be moving all of these into the ground quite soon.

Transferring the first seedlings

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Back in March I added some seeds to my propagator, and some of them had started to grow tall enough to move to a larger pot. Today, I decided to move out the rest of the growers to let me recycle the propagator with another round of seeds.

The sunflowers appear to be growing the best. The peppers did not grow at all – in fact they failed with such a high failure rate it must have been something about the conditions I gave them that they didn’t like. The tomatoes have been moved to larger pots with bambo to climb. This all happened before today, leaving only the nasturtium and remaining marigolds behind.

The first of the videos I hope to add to this blog. It’s entirely out of focus.

Pots one through four has nasturtium in them. Having looked again the the packet, nasturtium looks like it could be grown quite closely together, so I possibly could have gotten away with two in each pot. Number four actually has two nasturtium in, as one was kind of weedy.

In number five I packed a couple of the lesser grown marigolds.

Despite what I said in the video, I didn’t use Black Plastic Pot for the marigolds, but I did pack them all into Grey French Bucket. A smaller vesel, but BPP seemed too big to fill with soil for those tiny plants. The marigolds are tightly packed now, with only a few centimeters between each. I’m assuming that fine. We’ll find out. (“I’m assuming that’s fine… We’ll find out.” should be the tagline of this blog.)

All the repotted plants are now in Tiny Greenhouse.

As a bonus piece of news, as mentioned in the video, I bought a potting table from Wayfair. I think I only paid around £32 for it, so it’s quite cheap. The assembly instructions recommend a drill and two people, but I managed it on my own with only a screwdriver and a bit of creative positioning. It hasn’t fallen over yet.

Late night sowing

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This system of laying out the seed packets and then taking a photo of them isn’t the wisest. I’m assuming that the last three are marigolds and the three before that are nasturtium, but who knows. The two columns in the middle could be anything.

I made quite the effort to just get one seed in each pot to begin with. However, I got bored of that rather quickly and just started dashing them into thumble-sized holes.

These are going to live in my conservatory for the next few weeks. The conservatory gets rather warm during the day, but almost as cold as outside during the night. So, I’m not entirely sure they’ll survive a late March cold snap, but we’ll see.