Any suggestions?

We have an empty bed at the front of the house. (Well it's almost empty, there are a couple of self sown plants - a California poppy and a foxglove - growing there at the moment). As you can see from the photos it is an irregular shape but measures 3m at it's longest and just less than 3m at its widest.

We want to plant up the bed so that it is colourful for as much of the year as possible with perennial plants and bulbs. Bulbs for spring colour and the perennials for summer and autumn to give a sort of cottage garden feel. No doubt I'll pop in a few annuals to fill gaps etc at least until the perennials bulk up. A bit of winter colour can be provided by a couple of tubs by the door etc. We don't want to grow shrubby plants although we would like to grow something up the fence that our neighbour erected as this doesn't look good from our front window. The fence is about a metre high. The plants sprawling along part of it at the moment are a winter jasmine and a quince.

I've been searching for ideas for plants that have a long flowering season and have come up with penstemons, hardy geraniums, salvia, verbena and maybe the shorter Michaelmas daisies.

Just wondered if any of you had any suggestion for plants that reliably flower for a long time or really good ideas for what to grow up the fence.

New strawberries for next year?

The main activity on the plot at the moment is tidying and clearing. One area - the strawberry beds was in desperate need of tidying although you really need to see what the beds were like before my efforts at tidying up to appreciate how much better they look so here is the 'before' photograph complete with a self sown buddleia plant.

And here is what they look like now:

You may still be able to spot the buddleia in the second bed - I haven't decided what to do with it yet. The new bed will be prepared over winter and the old beds kept going next year until the new plants are producing well. At the moment the 'new strawberry bed' looks like this.

The existing strawberry beds have been in place for over three years and so we thought it was time to create a new bed. We have ordered four varieties, Marshmello (which we know is good main variety), Marshmarvel (a new early variety), Amelia (a late variety) and Finesse (a new everbearing variety).

These along with our alpines should give us a long picking season. We have sown new alpine strawberry seeds this year - we grow new plants every year -and the young plants are growing on in a nursery bed. We have found that alpine's need replacing fairly regularly and they are easily grown from seed - in fact some of the newly grown plants have already produced one or two berries and there are also a few self sown seedlings amongst this years plants. The variety is Mignonette which seems to be the easiest variety to find.

The alpines were still flowering up to this weekend but I guess the frost (yes it has reached us now!) of Sunday night has blackened the flowers and put paid to any more fruits.

We could have propagated Marshmello from runners taken from our old strawberry plants but we made the mistake of growing different varieties too close together and consequently it is difficult to tell which variety the runners have come from.

We’ll be more careful in future but it is a good to buy new stock from time to time. (Click here for more information on how we propagate and grow our strawberries).

I had considered planting the strawberries through weed suppressant membrane as the straw seems to encourage lots of weed growth but I have a few concerns such as -

• Would it harbour more slugs?
• How do I feed the plants?
• Does the soil become sour?
• Is it harder to weed once the weeds grow probably alongside the plants through the planting hole

As you can see lots of doubts so it's likely that it will be back to straw unless anyone has another idea about a suitable mulch!

Last week's diary entry is now posted on my website here and a photo album of our allotment taken last week is here

Can't blame the weather this week!

Only one visit to the plot this week - can’t blame the weather though as it has been fine and dry for most of the week. We have been having lots of work done at home including replacing all our windows so although we didn’t do much gardening we were very grateful for the dry, still and not too cold weather.

We did manage a plot visit to do a bit of weeding and digging up some of the remaining Sarpo Mira potatoes - fortunately not all were housing the 'snakes' mentioned in the last post. As expected some tubers were fairly large.

As usual  harvesting was our first priority. We had some bonus pickings including quite a few apples that we had missed and even a few strawberries to add to the alpine strawberries and autumn fruiting raspberries.

No doubt the frosts will soon descend and put an end to the fruit and flowers so we will have to enjoy them while we can!

We have also picked the medlars from the tree in the garden which are now bletting in a spare room. We really chose the tree more for it's ornamental value - which is why it is in the garden - so any fruit from it is a bonus.

If you are interested I have a page on my website which has lots of information about our medlars and how we used them last year. Click here if you want to read it.

My full - not that there was much to say about last week - diary entry for
last week is here on my website.

We are also adding some notes on which crops have done well this year and which haven't - it's an ongoing list but if you are interested the pages link from here

By the way so far the pansies are nibbleless!