July!

 How it is the end of July?

As the year whizzes by the garden gets more and more jungly! It is looking to be a good year as the wet and the heat has then helped get things going. Perhaps the best year yet!

The battle against the wet, slugs and snails: I know this is an issue for everyone this year as the mild winter and wet spring has meant we have a plague of monopods! This has made it very hard to grow some things such as dahlias, Cleome. The wet also seems to have rotted a lot of things like my tree dahlias (RIP).

Love for begonias: this continues to grow, particularly for hardy begonias. My current favourite is Begonia Torsa a  hybrid between a Bhutanese species and B. grandis. Its leaves can get up to 45cm! currently it is romping away. I will have lots of these available at my plant sale.

Thinning bamboos: This has been a great year for bamboo as they have all had a great flush of new culms. You do need to keep thinning them to keep them looking good. I also strip the lower leaves to expose the culms. When thinning them it is amazing how many culms you can take out and it feels like I have been filling our brown bin with bamboo every week for months!

Propagating a go-go: Having taken on a roof garden project at one of the hospitals I work at I am propagating a lot of plants! There are lots for this year’s plant sale.

Need more mulch and compost! The more I garden the more I realise how so much of the success of everything is down to the soil. I also always underestimate how much compost I need. This year I will have got through about 40 bags of compost and 15 of well rotted manure. However, with the soil now being so dry I realise how much more I could mulch. I have also used 20kg of blood fish and bone and a giant tub of pelleted chicken manure.

Hardy Colocasia’s: This year I am hoping is the year I crack Colocasia’s! I love these plants as they are so exotic, but in general I am rubbish at growing them. They can be hard to overwinter and seem to take ages to get going. This year I have got ‘Pink china’ (top)and am on my 3^rd year of growing  Colocasia gaoligongensis  (bottom). I am trying to keep them well watered and give them lots of fertilizer as I know they are hungry plants.