Mean Summer Rain

 

The summer holidays have started. And they have started in a very traditional English way - with rain. Sneaky rain, though. Hot and warm morning that tricked me into a sleeveless top, skirt and sandals, only to turn into downpour whilst we were in the supermarket picking up food for the week to follow. In hope, we went to my in-laws, thinking it might stop, but after getting wet and trying to garden under a family-sized umprella (yeah, naah, not possible) I gave up and retreated into the house to read some gardening blogs instead - in the same summery clothing, only with the addition of fluffy socks and a warm cardigan. 

Even though I really wanted to do some gardening (my plan was to sow some green manure in the gaps where the plants died or I harvested them to enrich the soil with nitrogen), the rain was quite a pleasant visitor, I only wish it announced itself. A couple of days ago we received a leaflet from our local watter supplier stating that "After months of low rainfall, water resources are below average". Well, not in our garden. Both of the water butts are full of rain water (and flourishing colonies of mosquito larvae) and there is always enough water for the plants. I only wish we had rainwater supply at our flat, so that I didn't have to water my many plants with water from the tap. I am sure that if it becomes a big problem, we'll find a way around it though. 

So - how did your holiday start?

Growing Seedlings in Toilet Paper Rolls

After last year's disappointment I decided that I will not grow sweetcorn again. The garden at my in-laws doesn't have enough sunlight, the soil dries up very quickly because of all the trees around it and cats and foxes digging up the seedlings did not help.

However, something changed my mind this year. Did you know that maize leaves, unlike the actual corn on the cob, are safe to feed to tortoises? Apparently so, as it is a grass (my information is from The Tortoise Table). That meant that as long as there are some leaves growing, I cannot be disappointed. And neither can Rocket.

After browsing ideas on Pinterest I decided to try growing my seedlings in toilet paper rolls. I have temporarily turned the bathroom into a planting area and started working on it. I cut the bottom into four flaps and folded them to create a little "pot".

It worked very well. As the plants grew, the roots found their way out of the bottom and I ended up with many healthy looking seedlings :) 

The Windowsill Jungle

I have been gone from home for a couple of days, paying a visit to my relatives and friends back in Slovakia. When I came home, this amazing jungle has been waiting for me! All of my seedlings - broad beans, cabbages, tomatoes, sunflowers, sweetcorn, pansies, pot marigolds - have been busy growing and the flat looks... quite overgrown! My two little tables in the living room and the windowsill in the kitchen were taken over by living green stuff! How exciting! :) I can't wait to re-locate this jungle outdoors.

Big thanks goes to my husband who managed well without me and watered all this growth whilst I was gone. Well done!

The Excitement of Spring

It is so sad that in this busy world we can get so distracted that we do not notice the gradual changes around us. And then suddenly we are really surprised when we find out that we let them pass us by without actually enjoying them. 

That nearly happened to me. But one day as I was walking to town spring suddenly hit me in the face with warm sunshine, sweet scent of flowers and bright colours - greens, yellows, violets - coming out of the ground everywhere. 

That evening I sat down with my seed collection, diary and an old copy of Gardener's World Magazine - Grow Your Own from 2015 and thought about what I will grow and where, whether to start my seedlings indoors and then re-pot them and when I'll do what.

I am particularly excited about this little selection of seeds from Shelled Warriors that my husband gave me for my birthday. This year I will not only try to grow food for us, but also for Rocket. 

With wellies on I dug up a few small beds today, but being constantly interrupted by rain, I soon retreated indoors to a warm cup of tea and a packet of crisps.

Succulent Presents

This September it has been  year since I started in my new job. It has been incredibly stressful and
there were times when I really had enough and I was thankful to have so many incredible colleagues by my side. Some of those people, however, decided to move on and leave and I felt that giving them a little something to remember me by was only appropriate.

I love giving presents, when I have enough time to make them or buy them - or in this case grow them! Some of these little Haworthia plants are especially significant to me, because I grew them from the offsets of a plant that was given to me by my best friend for my 16th birthday good 12 years ago.

I re-potted each one separately into simple plastic bowls from Sainsbury's Mono series. I also gave each person a card with the instructions about how to grow the plant. Everybody was really pleased with the present and I hope that the plants will live for a long time and create many more offsets. In the meantime, I am growing more - just in case. :)

There are days ...

...when I feel a bit bleak. That is when I start comparing myself to others. Normally I am quite content with my little self, the way I look, the way I act or how I do my job... But then there are days when all the people are smarter, more professional or better looking and with much more adventurous lives and many cooler pictures on Facebook.

Cosmos, radishes and chamomile seedlings. Aren't they wonderful?

And that is when I need to take a walk, go home and have a look at my bathroom windowsill and I know that this is my thing, that not everyone gets to grow vegetables in their flats and that even though this is not the norm, this is my little happy corner and yes, I am quirky, but that is just another way of saying "awesome". Life is good.

Crassula deltoidea

This lovely succulent Crassula deltoidea is one of my newest succulent plants. I purchased it during a succulent plant exhibition in Prague about two months ago and I am glad it survived the big move without any problems.

Now it has a sunny spot on the terrace together with few other plants and they all seem to be doing well, having enough sunshine and still being shielded from the rain.

However, it seems like nothing good can last forever in the garden over here. And even though the terrace is elevated and gets significantly smaller number of mollusk visitors, there still are some.

Whether it was a snail or a slug, I do not know, but the bite-marks are of a very distinctive shape of a gastropod jaw. Well, it got nibbled, but not killed and for that I can be thankful :)

Planty Surprises (both nice and bad)

After spending a month in the UK, we returned to Prague by car (our lovely old "Pootle" VW camper van) to pick up all my things. My life, seven years in Prague, neatly packed into boxes. The snails spent the month in dry and food-free tank, sleeping in their shells, closed by white epiphragms. As there are currently no restrictions to bringing invertebrate pets to the UK, we could have taken them. However, according to the government website, the number of plants that one can bring is limited to five per person - that made ten for the two of us together. So all of my lovely orchids have gone to my parents, who have also come to Prague by car.

Most of my plants were happy and have survived, but definitely not all of them.My tomatoes have dried on the windowsill, together with the carrots and chives... There was one little green fruit, clinging to life. A sad sight, really, but I wouldn't have been able to take them all with me anyway.

The succulents, on the other hand, have done splendidly on the windowsills, in the full sunshine. Most of them had turned slightly reddish in colour, but one of the little Haworthias has shot up a flower stalk. And now I understand what all the succulent growers talk about when they say how hard it is to photograph these plants in flower. Which really makes me want to set up a little photo corner with black background and take really nice photos.

Stapelia hirsuta has also done wonderfully, clearly these planties are alive by sun more than by water. Even though it is tiny, it grew an enormous flower bud. It survived the transport and first two days in Britain, but we have just had a few rainy days and half of the bud got eaten away by slugs, which is too bad, but at least we know what this plantie is capable of and can look forward to more pretty smelly flowers in the future (and when I say smelly, I really mean it. Stapelia flowers usually smell of rotten meat.)

Windowsill Salad

After about a week of rain the weather turned warm again, bees are buzzing in the garden, white fluff from poplars flies around in the wind and the streets smell like barbecues and my windowsill vegetables are growing nicely. Summer always makes me want to eat healthy food. this time I made a salad of lettuce, spinach and beetroot leaves and pea shoots that I grew.

With some egg, red onion, sesame seeds and dressing added and combines with a nice hot crunchy bun, it made a great dinner. One day, I will be able to grow all these ingredients in my own garden. Soon, I hope :)

Two Very Hungry Caterpillars

I was wondering how one little green pea-coloured caterpillar can make so much damage in a container, but that was until I looked into the container this morning and spotted it's slightly larger soil-coloured friend!

The top of nearly every plantie is nibbled off (the youngest and juiciest bits), so they had to go... flinged them straight into my landlord's garden.

I haven't figured out what species they are yet (mostly because I am lazy), but I have realized that being friendly to them isn't going to work out. Maybe if I had a whole garden bed of pea plants, then I could tolerate a couple of them :)

Anyway, are there any caterpillar problems where you are? If so, what species and how do you deal with them?

When Peas and Chives Embrace ...

The windowsill is teeming with plant life! Weekend will definitely be the time to go out and collect some poles, because the little pea plants are getting a little grippy : )

Switching to Summer Time

I think not many people realize how stressful it can be for a person to switch to a different time. Being a bit of anxiety-ridden creature, I never have to worry about switching to winter time, as missing it means that I would come everywhere one hour early. But in spring, when the summer time switch comes, even though it always happens during the weekend, I am always checking, always making sure that I switched the time on my mobile, our kitchen clock, in my head, always checking and re-checking... And being at home mostly on my own means there is nobody to check the time with me, to reassure me that I did everything right. For a few days, I'm always worrying "what if"... At every underground stop, I check the time, I have a look at every single clock I see on my way.
But it has been three days now and the world hasn't collapsed and I haven't missed a single thing, so now is the right time to enjoy the fact that springtime is here, not only on the clock, but also out in the wild : ) (or on my windowsill where the picture of this lovely chives flower was taken)

Spring Joys

✿ the orchid that I mentioned in the previous post has opened some more flowers ✿

✿ one of my other orchids is shooting up a flowering stem. I don't really remember what colour it was, I think that it's white, but I am not sure, so it's even more exciting ✿

✿ the Haworthia succulents are enjoying their spot in the sun and their middles are light green - a sign that they are growing ✿

✿ the little Stapelia is growing a new stem as well. It is light green and short and hairy and its growth is visible every single day. You can really see the difference. I can't wait for the weather to be warm enough to put these plants outdoors for a few months again. ✿

✿ Thanks to the newly open flowers, Anthurium matches its pot again ✿

✿ my friends brought me a belated and colourful birthday gift ✿

✿ even the aquarium is the good shade of green now : ) ✿

✿ ✿ ✿

Repotting Elephant's Feet

Three years ago, I bought a pack of Beaucarnea recurvata seeds, also known as ponytail palm or elephant's foot. The seeds nicely sprouted and grew and grew. Out of about eight seeds, I got five plants. One went to my friend and the remaining four were growing happily on my windowsil.

Now that I am ill, there's not much I can do at home, so I started repotting the plants that need it. Here they are:

The smallest and most irregularly shaped one has four buds on its stem and I can't wait to see them grow and see how the shape of the plant will change in the following years.

There's also one plant that isn't mine. I got it from a friend, when I was looking for plants to put in the classroom. It looks poorly, it is somehow shrunk, in a really hard soil and barely has any roots. I repotted it as well and hope to make it look and grow a bit better.

New Succulents

There is something magical about succulents in the last sunrays of the autumn evening. These three are my newest, a result of a girls' outing to a succulent exhibition (and I do realize that must sound completely nuts to non-biologists).

All of my planty friends, including the second round of lettuces and undergrown tomato plants have been moved indoors now and it's getting a little crowded here. It's a good thing that now I have a classroom and a teachers' room to put stuff in!!

Windowsill Gardening 2013 - Peas and Salads

I am going to be Alys Fowler of windowsil gardeners! Some months ago, after an excessively exhausting English lesson that I gave, I took the money for a little trip to BauHaus and exchanged it for some pots and soil to keep compay to my lonely seeds at home.

I cleared out some ivy that is growing on the house and recently started shading my room too much and even growing in through the open window (greenvasion, I call it) – it was bit of an ivy massacre, but the space gain was well worth it.

Peas used to be my favourite plant to grow and eat as a kid. In these pictures, the peas looks amazing, there were lots of flowers and even pods started forming. However...  now it will rest in peace in compost. All my plants got some nasty disease, which looks like a fungus - white powder of spores falling down from the surface of the plant and even the pods and flowers started falling down. So no peas this year.

Another packet of seeds that I bought was "speedy salads". They really do grow quickly and taste great. Snails like them as well. Now most of them have gone into flower, so I am growing another container full of juicy green salad leaves to enjoy before winter.

I used the leaves in salads many, many times. I really enjoy how it works. I take care of salads and salads take care of me :)

Orchids

Two of my four orchids opened their flowers last week - the yellow-and-pink one was a present froma  friend for my birthday two years ago and the spotted white-and-pink one is my last bargain from IKEA unwanted plants discount shelf.

One more would be flowering with them, it shot out a nice stem, but I managed to break it when moving the pot (SILLY sheep!!). It is even sadder because of the fact that I bought that one without any buds or flowers, so I do not know what the flowers look like. It would be a surprise, but I wil have to wait for a longer time now ;-) Stupidity and carelessness never pay off!

And the sun shone

Even though yesterday started with a downpour, soon the steely clouds were taken over by lovely sunshine, which my little Haworthias on the kitchen window surely appreciated. And me too, even though I have to stay in because I am ill. But I have enough work, food, tea, medicine and paper tissues not to have to leave the flat for another three days ;)

Also, three more leaf insects hatched today, I hope they will have no trouble with eating and will happily grow.

I'm doing it again...

I am saving plants from the discount section at IKEA. Again. I am thinking I can make their miserable little lives better and make them thrive at my home. I always have hard times leaving a plant on a discount shelf. I know most people wouldn’t buy them, even though - just like in this case – the plant might have just stopped flowering and suddenly it is not worth the money it was before. It’s healthy, it’s not damaged, it’s even still attractive – but people wouldn’t take it when there are dozens of other ones, still having flowers. Well, I DO take it and save more than 50% and will have a plant just as pretty as everyone else, if I don’t kill it like the Crassula succulents that I got from the same place some time ago.

For those who cannot understand this compassion towards plants - imagine it’s not a plant, imagine it’s a puppy. A little puppy sitting on a shelf, looking at you with its big cuddly eyes, silently screaming: “Take me home! Love me!” and you know it’s there, sad, alone and unwanted and you know that it could grow and be wonderful, but nobody would give it the chance, just because it looks a bit shabby. And you know you already have ten dogs at home, but you simply can't leave this one there... You will always find some spare corner for it.  It’s the same with me and plants. So – now you see my problem????!

Enlightened by the setting sun

The late afternoon pleasures of living in a west-facing room

One of my praying mantises Sphodromantis lineola
lineola out on a walk around the Ficus plant.
She was vey clever and managed to catch a huge fly.

Aloe plant that my Grandma has tortured by
overwatering, now happily growing in its
dry and sunny spot.

Detail of a leaf of my avocado plant.