It’s only 3 May and the roses are already covered in aphids. This is not a good omen. I read somewhere recently that it is going to be a really bad year for aphids, slugs and snails and it looks like they were right. Out with the soapy water spray!

This old stone sink has been kicking around the garden for years. It is very shallow and has a wobbly bottom but it is a little piece of history and I like it a lot. I have decided to plant it up with alpine plants like Sempervivums, Saxifrage, Phlox and Sisyrinchium. It is extremely heavy so my strapping son helped me lift it on to the corner of the pond where it is now neatly hiding the water inlet pipe. More news to come!

Ok, it’s not very pretty and I need more practice, but surely not bad for a first attempt! The sweet peas will scramble up no problem and it should look au naturel.

Funny how these things happen. I was chatting to a neighbour called Mike the other day and he mentioned that his ‘pension’ was a small 4 acre woodland he had bought as an investment some years ago and which he was now actively managing. “What type of woodland?” I asked him, “mostly Ash, Hazel, Birch, Chestnut and Sycamore with Hawthorn and Blackthorn hedges, it hasn’t been touched for years” he said. “I am gradually bringing it back into a good state, opening it up to let light in and getting rid of the rubbish like the self sown Ash and Sycamore which are choking out the good stuff”. He was obviously excited about it and it made me wish I had a woodland of my own. “I’ve learnt so much about trees that I never knew before” he said “and I am quite good at coppicing Hazel now too”.

It was when he said “coppicing Hazel”, that my ears really pricked up and I thought of all those lovely bean poles and pea-sticks. And sure enough, he offered me as much coppiced material as I wanted – delivered to the door, free of charge. “Glad to get rid of it” he said. What a bloke. Mike, my new best friend!

I have never woven hazel supports before but have often admired them in ‘posh’ gardens and thought how natural they look, much better than bamboo canes and string. I paid a lot of money for rusty steel supports at Malvern last year and they are unobtrusive but somehow I like the simplicity of Hazel even better. I have yet to find out if my ham-fisted attempt at weaving them together is going to work!

This tall Knautia macedonica is particularly floppy and can grow 1.5m high so it needs good support for it’s waving stems and dark red flower heads. I know it looks a bit rough and ready at the moment but in a few weeks it will all be hidden by foliage. It’s like an old fashioned ladies wired underskirt keeping everything where it should be!

I’m back! I know I have been absent for a while and I hope you didn’t give up on me. I think I hit the infamous blogger’s ‘six month wall’. For reasons which are difficult to explain, a lot of bloggers lose the enthusiasm or the desire to continue their blogs and often stop altogether. The impetus stalled and I felt really guilty. Admittedly, I have also been more involved with committee business for the Cheltenham Horticultural Society for which I am now Publicity Officer, but that is probably just an excuse. Anyway, I have a number of ideas for keeping the blog fresh, interesting and entertaining and I hope you will stick with me.

I hope you like the new header picture; it was taken last week at the garden of author and gardening journalist Mary Keen at The Old Rectory, Duntisbourne Rous near Cirencester. I have admired Mary’s writing in the Daily Telegraph and The RHS Garden magazine for many years and looked forward to her NGS Open Day on Monday. It was….disappointing. This deserves a blog post of its own and I will put finger to keyboard very shortly on this topic.

It has been a long, wet, difficult winter and I have to confess, I have been a bit depressed about the garden. Living in a bungalow with the garden on three sides gives me the opportunity to move from room to room and see every aspect regardless of the weather. This is generally a good thing. It enables me to look out and plan the work to be done, often very early in the morning in pyjamas!

This picture reflects my most recent activity, getting the raised beds ready for a variety of cut flowers and vegetables. I am going to try tomatoes outdoors this year having built new staging in the greenhouse over winter where the tomatoes and chillies used to grow. I once had an allotment and grew tomatoes outdoors very successfully there so I am hoping the same will be true in a raised bed.

The electric propagators are all full of emerging seedlings in the greenhouse and as usual I will shortly run out of space. I always end up juggling between the main greenhouse, the tiny Wickes ‘overspill’ pop-up greenhouse, cold frames and the big risk…..planting out early! I check the detailed short and medium term weather forecast every day and it looks like we may have seen the last of the frosts so this weekend will see the dahlias planted out in the cutting garden.

A friend suggested I grow my sweet peas up ‘outward facing’ 8′ canes this year for a change. The theory is it allows a row of strawberries to be grown in front of the sweet peas and the flowers rise above and out towards you for easy picking…my wife (the sweet pea fairy who does all the tying-in and picking) is not convinced yet!

One of the wonderful side benefits of our old Labrador who constantly sheds hair is the copious amount of free nesting material it provides the blue tits at this time of year. I put it into a fat ball spiral feeder and it’s gone in days.

Hoping and praying for a long hot summer, the next most important job is to install 100 metres of ‘leaky pipe’ irrigation which has been in the shed for nearly 10 years waiting for this moment. Like a lot of things we own, it was bought on a whim, an impetuous moment of weakness, but I still think it was £65 well spent. I planned to install it last year but, as we all know, it turned out not to be necessary!

This is pretty Chinodoxa luciliae ‘Pink Giant’ which usually follows the snowdrops and accompanies the ubiquitous grape hyacinths, Muscari armeniacum, but this year it sits in the cold and wet soil, reliable but alone.

It seems that bananas may be good for our plant health as well as our own. Not sure how well known this tip is but yesterday a nurseryman told me to save my breakfast banana skins and use them as a high potassium fertiliser! Apparently, they break down in the soil or a pot really slowly and release up to 40% potassium which is great for flowers and fruit. He was referring particularly to Clematis but said it worked really well for roses and tomatoes too.
You can either bury the skins directly under the plant or spread them out on the surface of the soil, and because they turn brown quickly, you won’t see them after a few days. He also said it was easy to store them for later use by drying them in a warm oven for half an hour and then sealing them in an air-tight container kept somewhere cool. As it happens, I have just had a banana with my muesli and yoghurt so I will be checking it out!

I may have inadvertently stumbled upon a way of getting tender plants through the winter – bury them in your compost heap!                                                                                        This fuchsia which flowered beautifully in it’s pot all last summer was unceremoniously ‘dumped’ into the compost in October followed by all manner of debris and detritus, dead and forgotten as far as I was concerned…..until yesterday.

As I was turning the heap and adding loads of dead grass and thatch from the early spring lawn scarifying I came across this sad, but obviously alive specimen, struggling back to life. My inclination was to chop it up and put it back in the compost heap but a little voice was telling me to see if it survives. The little voice won. It’s now split into two, snail eggs removed, roots washed and pruned and back in pots in the greenhouse. Updates to follow!