December announced its arrival with the first real frost of the year. For the past couple of years this wintery event has followed very close on from bonfire night and has ended our alpine strawberry season.
All is fairly quiet on the allotment site when we pay a visit to collect the weekly vegetable supply. The first entry in my December diary is now posted on my website here.
Much gardening is confined to indoors and our fairly newly planted hippeastrum/amaryllis bulbs are growing well, one having produced a bud - well if you look really closely a bulb is just beginning to emerge.
Can you spot it?
There's more about amaryllis here on my other blog.
Anyone any idea of what this plant is officially called now? It's a bit like the geraniums that are really pelargoniums! Although this plant is commonly referred to as an amaryllis apparently that isn't correct even though it is sold by that name in garden centres etc. Amaryllis grow in South Africa and these bulbs - Hippeastrum - originate from South America. Hippeastrum is a Greek name meaning 'horseman's star'. There are over 75 species but only about three or four are commonly available in garden centres. Other varieties are available online with quite a good range available from here. More exotic varieties are shown on the posting here.
Advice on how to grow these bulbs is available here
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for visiting and leaving a comment - it is great to hear from you and know that there are people out there actually reading what I write! Come back soon.
(By the way any comments just to promote a commercial site, or any comments not directly linked to the theme of my blog, will be deleted)
I am getting quite a lot of spam. It is not published and is just deleted. I have stopped sifting through it and just delete any that ends up in my spam folder in one go so I am sorry if one of your messages is deleted accidentally.
Comments to posts over five days old are all moderated.