Be Excellent To Each Other

Points for effort, I must say.

Must be a hell of a mess to scare those sort of rats away.

Exciting chilli update!

• It turns out that Hungarian Hot Wax at the "pale yellow with slightest hint of red" stage are a) sweet, b) slightly fruity and c) unexpectedly hot in the seeds and white flesh. Not blinding hot, but a bearable, persistent tingle in the mouth after eating a raw 1mm slice. We have many of these sizeable fruits at this stage. Excellent.
• A Fresno in the kitchen went from "solid green like all the others" to "9/10 brilliant red" literally overnight. Bizarre, given the shit weather recently. We have many, many that have not done this yet.
• A Cayenne's done the same. Likewise we have many that haven't done this.
• The Tabascos are flowering! And there are fruits appearing! Including one 1cm long chilli which hopefully will ripen and not drop off!
• The second batch of plants have not only been flowering but now have actual real chillis on them, despite being all of a foot tall.
• I continue to collect dead flowers from all the plants - about 3 dozen from just the 8 plants at the allotment last night
• Last night we put sciarid nematodes into all the soil. Stupid cunting flies.

We have literally by far the largest bell pepper that I've ever seen, and I've spent time in rustic Italy and Cyprus (ie places where the locals get to buy the good stuff that they don't ship to the stupid unaware Britishers). If a cunting slug gets to that one I'm going to be most upset (despite pellets liberally strewn they've got to at least 50% so far, and they're not being hugely productive plants). It hasn't shown signs of ripening yet, which is peculiar because a wrinkled runty one in the same greenhouse has also done the "overnight ripening" thing.

2012 season! Having gone so over the top last year in an anxious fit of lacking confidence and knowledge - something like 76 viable chilli plants - I determined to plant far fewer this year. So, yesterday I sowed 5 seeds of each variety to allow a couple of failures in each while getting a good number of chillis.

Unfortunately, we also went to the garden centre and I got a bit "kid in a sweet shop", meaning I now have 11 varieties - 55 potential plants. Added are habanero, padron, a purple one I don't remember the name of, and naga jolokia. It was Helen made me buy that, I was going for milder types.

Plus I've started trying to wake the plants I over-wintered; 27-ish after whittling down through mould and rot and most still seem to have good root balls. Which reminds me, I need to buy a load more chilli food.

I put 25 pepper seeds in too, again including a purple one.

Then there's white and red onions, red shallots, 3 types of potato (laid out to chit), aubergines, gherkins, cucumbers, garlic (already in and doing well), saffron crocuses (down last year, doing well but no flowers expected this year), millions of peas and beans, courgettes, butternut squash, half a dozen varieties of tomato...

Turns out £16 is still the cheapest on Amazon for a litre of Chilli Focus... but someone's doing 5L for £22! I've still not finished the litre I bought last year, but I was terrible at using it properly. Going to have to try harder now.

This year I've decided I can't be arsed, and pretty much won't be growing anything.

Spent most of the day in our garden yesterday, lovely to have the sunshine again.

Moved a hoster / bamboo / early wildflowers into different spots (and pots) and had a good tidy up.

Petrol lawnmower wouldn't start, so that's off for a service (well overdue).

I really enjoy pottering about in the back, just need to make a modelling bench now.

Best place to mulch your mum.

Ooh, and mushrooms! We got oyster, chestnut and button mushroom windowsill kits a couple of months ago, and got a quick burst from each then nothing... except the chestnut pack is now exploding with them, and it looks like the button kit will soon do the same. Nothing new from the oyster ones yet, unfortunately.

Helen's gone mental for the tomatoes this year, and planted 30 seeds of 9 varieties A dozen aubergines (two varieties) went down too, and at least a dozen courgettes (3 or 4 varieties).

Good grief.

I wish I had a garden.

I wish I didn't.

You won't when your a poor student again living with crack whores on the sidewalk during your Omega freshman trimester.

Ive' decided not to bother this year after the wind wrecked everything last year. I've still got some strawberries growing though.

I bought a basil plant from the supermarket when we moved here over six months ago. It's still going strong. In fact, I've had to chop it down a few times because it gets so big. Would it be safe to plant it in the garden now?

I wouldn't bother; we keep all our herbs in 4-6in pots, currently under a kloch by the back wall where remarkably they survived over winter.

Chilli BLAST OFF!

Loads of mould too, unfortunately. Not sure what to do about that. "Suck it and see" maybe, hoping it dies off once they're out of the heated propogator, likely to be this weekend.

We did cucumbers and gherkins the other evening as well, it turns out. Almost there!

So it's a Basil Bush?

Hello there.

I'm pretty sure that a few years ago I planted some seeds for some flowers, hoping to see a display of colour at some point in the future. I currently have some pretty purple flowers in my garden, but I don't know if these are what I planted all those years ago, or are actually (shock, horror) weeds!

They're looking a bit wilted right now, but despite being past their prime I was wondering if anyone could identify them for me. Any ideas?

Is there a bit of a ‘bulb’ or pod under the head of the flower? If so it may be knapweed.

And a weed is only a weed if you don’t want it there! Unless Japanese knotweed, because that’s actually evil.

Yes, I think you're right. Thanks for that.
No idea if it's one of the things I planted, but I like the look of it so might spare it for now.

Google Lens says it is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurea_montana

Edit - which is indeed knapweed, I missed that at first!

I had to trim the lane for the third time in a week, because stupid weather and stupid farmer.

The interesting bit is that a nettle stung me.

Normal nettles are around an "oh, look, a nettle has been lying on my skin for an hour and I finally noticed" severity that I immediately forget about again, but which would leave Helen intensely annoyed for a few days.

This one... This one was an instant "who just drove a spike through my hand?!" Sensation with a tingling and minor swelling that is still ongoing 8 hours later.

Serious nettle.

Was it giant hogweed?

There's at least one kind of umbrelum along the lane, but the 'string' descriptions don't match up.

I have no idea what to do with our garden. I just keep cutting the grass and hoping for inspiration.

Picture of the garden?

The trees at the back are a bit of a pain because they presumably block the sun from most of the back half of the garden. Unless you want that much lawn, I'd look at probably dividing it in half. Big raised bed on the right hand side about halfway down, put a path in that goes round the front of the pond up to the back half of the garden. Put a bed up against the back wall to give the lawn an edge. I'll sketch something.

A statue of Grim...

Buy one of these and make your garden into a miniature jump course.

Yes, I'm going to cut the trees back that hang over, but I can't do any more than that. I like the thought of a path that goes around the back of the pond and towards the back. Anything else just needs to be low maintenance. I like being out there and am happy to keep it nice, but I don't have a lot of time to spend on it.

I have a similar issue in my garden. I'll take some pictures soon and get everyone's advice.

Invite us all around and we'll spend an evening making suggestions...

Yes, but it what about the garden?

We really should do something though.

Do you have a budget in mind? Also what access do you have into the garden? From the picture, it looks like you need to come through the house.

You can get to the garden through either the house or the garage, but there is no other access from the front.

Budget is a little as possible for now. We are planning to have all of the back rooms knocked into one to create a large kitchen diner, this will involve knocking down a couple of outside walls and a new first story roof going on. It seems daft to do too much closer to the house when it will be a building site for a while. That doesn't stop us from planning and making a start though.

Ok, you could start by getting rid of all that ivy at the bottom of the garden, it looks like its covering a few nice plants.

Once done you could form a bed down there, (use a lawn edging tool) and maybe also plant the shrubs in the bed that you currently have in those wooden pots on the lawn

Use some bark mulch on the bed this will make it look tidy and slows down the weeds.

Some work to do but relatively low cost as you have the plants and maybe need £60 worth of tree bark.

I dislike gardening so much, it never seems to end. Which is why we've spent thousands of pounds and weeks of our time taking down hedges and decking our entire back garden, and a third of the way down one side of the house. We also got rid of all the hedges between us and next door, widened the drive, put a fence up and paved everything.

We did rotovate and seed the front garden but I can't be bothered tending to it to make it nice so I've got a man coming round next week to look at turfing it for us. We do everything ourselves but making a lawn is not my idea of a fun or rewarding job.

I think this would make a really good start. We do need to take the time to clear it first and the ivy is hiding a lot of ugliness from what I can see. It looks like they've had their own compost heap going on, and I've found no end of dog toys and socks buried. The plant in the large planter seems to be on some sort of concrete raised base. Again, more investigation required.

Flis, I dislike gardening for the most part too. If it wasn't for the access issue, I think I would have paid someone to tidy it up properly by now.

My new garden has gone full on jungle. I've already started hacking back unwanted trees etc but time is a problem at the minute. I imagine I'll be along here for advice/inspiration at some point...

We're probably going to do the same. I don't mind some of it, but the patio and lawn parts definitely need some work.

Flamethrower

WTAF where's the sketch for my garden?

You never asked!

Like it doesn't look like shit!

Apart from the other suggestions, restaining your fence panels will make them look wayyyyy better.

Oh yes, this is definitely on the to-do list. I just need time and weather to match up!

Forgot to take a before photo, but this was quite over grown with weeds. Just a small start, but will keep chipping away at it when I can.

Some bulbs I planted in the Autumn have started poking their shoots up due to the mild December. Now we're entering the cold snap, are they going to be killed or are bulbs more resilient? Or should I be doing something to give them love and attention?