Off The Edge Gardening

Happy New Six on Saturday to you all.  What is Six on Saturday you ask?  Can I believe my ears?  Where have you been for the last century, Mars?  I suggest you take your rocket ship over to Mr P’s planet, our commandant’s home, and it will all become clear.  Let us proceed.

Earlier in the week we were visited by the feisty storm Eleanor*.  A sleepless night left us feeling a little battered the next day.  The windows are streaked with brine, the recycling is in Somerset and plants are looking slightly stunned.  This morning I smiled when I noticed a desiccated hydrangea bloom dangling from the telephone wire outside our bedroom window.  Today it has been sliding one way, then the other, like a floral tightrope walker.

A couple of weeks ago I was kindly given a coreopsis by one of my esteemed clients.  It was an unwanted gift.  Not for me, you must understand, for them.  It was very welcome for me.  During the recent skirmishes it was somehow robbed of its pot, which has not been found, and left embarrassingly naked from the waist down.  My dysfunctional gardener solution was to bung it in this oversized pot until I get around to sorting it.  Is that sirens I can hear?

Apparently there is an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.  There is good reason.  It is warm and the sun shines.  There is just one coffee plant in my back garden and it is looking a little the worse for wear.  It has been living in the house (quite rightly) but was sent outside to sit on the naughty step as it had an aphid infestation.  Then we (yes “we” ) forgot to bring it back in again when it got on the nippy side and a tad breezy.  Silver lining – there is no sign of white fly.

That has got the weather stuff out of my system.  Let us move onto something else.  Oh yes, some agapanthus seed heads.   I love seed, a little too much perhaps.  But so does our leader The Propagator, and a mention will keep him happy.

My other half loves spider plants.  I don’t.  As we live in a democracy (at the moment) I concede to this adoration.  It could be much worse.  So he keeps on propagating them, rather they keep propagating themselves and he pots them on.  Or divides them.  Many moons ago he read how they clean the air or some such nonsense (unfortunately for me, possibly true nonsense).  There is now at least one in every room of the house.  I took one off his hands and planted it outside.  It will die, I hoped.  It hasn’t.  It just looks even uglier.  Surrounded by weed and manky apples precisely sums up my feelings.  Yuk.

What a gloomy selection of photos, not to mention the doomy text.  That is not the way to start the new year.  I will finish with a picture to raise the spirits a little; crocus and Jetfire daffodils emerging through the violas.  Not long ’til  spring, but until then, let us enjoy what we have.

Thanks Lord Propagator for emotionally blackmailing me yet again into submitting my SoS, and of course for hosting the meme (yes I said meme again).  Fingers crossed for next week!

* I have generally found that whenever I moan or gripe about my life, indulge myself in self pity, things are inadvertently brought to my attention to put me to shame.  And quite rightly so.  If I am feeling ill, I read about someone far poorlier than I am hopping up Kilimanjaro with a smile on their face.  If I am feeling hard done by, I hear of some underprivileged soul doing kindnesses to those more fortunate than themselves.  And if the weather is getting me down, I am shocked by TV clips of blizzards and droughts and floods and general devastation the experience of which is far from mine.  Therefore please bear in mind that I am fully aware of the pathetic nature of any weather system that might befall us here in the UK and our embarrassing inability to cope with it.  It was a pretty windy though.