Hi!
Well, the spring garden sure has woken up and taken off. I'm REALLY enjoying my cottage/kitchen garden - so easy to nip out the door and grab a few lettuce leaves as I need them for a sandwich, rather than not bothering if I had to take a bigger walk down to the lower garden to get some.
The herbs are all either in full flower or coming into flower. OK, so photo overload.
Danielle's rose bush
My honeysuckle I put in before winter.
A very large borage plant. Much bigger than my usual ones.
My lemon balm just LOVED the compost boost it received when I added in the new garden.
The circle garden is starting to fill out again.
My hydrangea with its changing colour flowers. It started off a blue-purple as per the front flower, and is gradually getting more pink as per the rear left flower (strangely, it's meant to be harder to change a hydrangea from blue to pink - which would indicate that my soil has a higher pH than what it was grown in likely has more lime in it).
My "older" part of the herbal garden is finally filling in really nicely - has taken about 3 years!
I recently potted up all my random tufa, clay and ceramic pots that I've been collecting. This row only gets about an hour of sunshine at the end of the day, but I think the plants in there will thrive ok. And being positioned near my tap/hose they will at least get regular water.
A few flowers I couldn't resist picking - chive flowers, pyretherum daisy and not sure what the dark purple ones in the front are...
One of my large pumpkins from the autumn harvest finally being chopped open to eat. It's lived out on my front porch on a shelf over winter and looks pretty tasty now!
The comfrey is about to flower. I also "aggravated" the roots a bit a few months back to increase my plant numbers and the baby seedlings are finally starting to grow.
The nettle patch has really taken off and are all in full seed now. Just need to wait for the right time to harvest them - that I'm not so sure of since I haven't done it before. So I'm just checking them every day to see if the clusters of seeds "drop" a bit more and then I think it's time to cut the tops off to dry and allow the seeds to drop into a paper bag (someone please advise me if this doesn't sound right!).
The area being cleared in the lower garden ready to take our new (hand me down) garden shed that will be hopefully be arriving in the next few weeks.
I've made a few tinctures over the past few months - chickweed and calendula (still to do my research into using them, but they're there at least!).
5 comments:
It's all looking so fertile and verdant! Lovely to "hear" from you;-)
Hi Nikki, are you harvesting the nettle seed to eat/for medicine? If it's the annual nettle (and it looks like it, but hard to tell from the photo), then the clusters don't drop very much. They also flower and seed at the same time - your photos looks like seeds and a few flowers (white) but not many empty seed capsules.
If you pick a cluster and examine closely you'll be able to see the seeds inside their green capsules (just open them up). Once you get lots of the capsules with identifiable seeds in them then you can harvest. I've been harvesting seed at different stages - still some flowers through to when the flowers are mostly gone but some of the seed capsules are empty.
I'm meant to be doing a post on nettle seed, when I get the time!
cheers,
lus
Thanks Sharon!
Lus, thanks for your comment. I think I have annual nettles (urens). That's good to know that they won't drop as much as the pictures I've been looking at. I will go down and investigate them to see where they're at. Will look out for a post on your blog about nettles. Thanks again!
Wow your front yard is looking fantastic! It's come a long way since I last saw it. You should have herbs coming out your ears in no time at all :)
Thanks again for those lemon balm plants you gave me! One is still in its original pot, and it's only grown about 1cm... the other was put into my herb garden and now looks like a healthy shrub, it's huge! Must find a spot for the little one before it gives up on me all together!
Em, good to hear that your lemon balm is doing well. I'm amazed at the shrubiness of mine this year.
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