It’s been a while since I did anything other than add seed info to this blog. I don’t have a particularly good reason, other than that I’ve found life a bit difficult since my accident.
My last post was about collecting and sorting the snapdragon seeds, of which I probably have thousands. Those are now little seedlings growing in trays, a 100 or so to a tray at a guess. I’ll prick them out and pot them on in 12 x 7cm pots of each colour. Last year that gave me around 72 plants.
I’m about to do a series of ‘what worked and what didn’t’ posts. If for no other reason than to remind myself what not to plant. Tall plants look great but, with a skinny border and the Langholm climate, tend to start falling over in inclement weather.
I managed to keep the pond looking good for most of 2024/25 but with the onset of winter I moved the minnows indoors and lost my impetus a bit. It is now in an absolute shit state. I need to drain it and pretty much start from scratch. We had a problem with leeches that kept eating the ramshorn snails, so I gave up on that as well. I have a tank upstairs which is teeming with snails, hopefully they’ll be able to go back in the pond after it’s cleaned and cycled.
This isn’t the only barrel we have. There are two more, one housing the apple tree I grew from seeds I harvested from an apple tree my dad planted in his garden. I wanted to grow at least one tree from them in memory of him. I’ve probably mentioned this before so I won’t go on about it too much. I went from 11 to 4 after giving away 7 seedlings. Of those 4 I only have 1 left, but it’s doing OK.
The other is a bird bath. Yes you read that right, a bird bath!
I sowed forget-me-nots around the tree and have some ivy and lavender in there as well. The lavender is a probably hopeless method of keeping aphids at bay.
Finally, the bird bath.
We used to have a free standing metal bird bath, link at the end of this post. It was a bit of a pain in the butt as the bird poop was getting all over the paving amongst other issues and I wanted something a bit more natural / bird friendly. So we took the metal dish off and stashed the rest.
I filled a whisky half barrel with kindling wood in a bag, put some weed membrane over that and then filled it to about 3″ from the top with compost, topped off with hortcultural grit. I pressed the metal bowl into the centre and then planted around it.
I’ve had varying degrees of success. On the left is how it looked towards the end of the year. On the right was early summer. I lost my patience with the sedum and pulled it all out. It was taking over and getting ratty, also the jackdaws loved pulling on it. I replaced it with violas and also planted them on the opposite side where there was a nascent bramble – that got yanked as well. The saxifrage coughed it’s last over this last winter, it just got too wet. I’ve cut it back and am waiting to see if it recovers.
The birds love it, so it’s working as intended. They still poop everywhere though.
Gratuitous whippet photo because they’re just so damn photogenic.
This is the bird bath we disassembled. It’s actually really well made and sturdy but I had concerns about the dogs banging into the metal leaves and getting hurt.
I will say it does not rust, and is easy to clean.
