20th - 21st April April

20^th April

I discussed with my 5 year old assistant gardener and consultant on garden design about what colours of sweet peas should go where. I want to again go for one colour for each of 4 fence panels. Little dots of different colour en mass are all well and good, but for impact in our garden, you need a large block of colour. After steering him away from putting blue next to magenta, we decided that the colours would go red, blue, white, magenta which was almost what I had thought myself (just swap the red and white). So today after work I planted out 7 of the white Swan Lake sweet peas that I bought from Hilliers along the third panel. I dug holes and put in some compost mixed with season-long fertiliser pellets and put in the plants and watered. Later I had to sprinkle some slug pellets – again, the organic ones – and felt the sink of ‘here we go again with the slug fight’ feeling. I wanted to put up some netting on the fourth panel but found that the little I had would not be anywhere near enough so I came up with the plan of stapling garden twine to the fence making 2 rows across. More can follow as the plants grow. I would have liked to plant out more sweet peas but I had much to do indoors instead.

21^st April

At lunch time I borrowed a van from work, put in some long pallets that I found waiting to be thrown away (they will make good raised bed frames) and a few wooden battons, then drove off to my brother-in-law’s house to load up the remaining 32 bags of soil – back breaking. Then off to the allotment to unload and then back to work to drop off the van. A job well done.

After work there was no decision time necessary as it was a most definite plan to get out in the garden at the earliest opportunity to continue planting out the sweet peas. 8 Each of Scarlett along the first fence panel, Blue Danube along the second and Cupani along the fourth. I have quite a few spares of each in case any don’t have the energy to grow much like a few last year. There are extras of the ones I bought from Hilliers, plus the ones I sowed myself both of the successful blue and red ones and the poor white and magenta ones as well as the ones of the mixed packet, so a fair few colours especially when you consider I have 2 types of white and 2 types of magenta as well as any in the mixed lot of similar colour. These will provide the display growing up the canes in the wider border in front of the privet hedge.

For each plant I dug a hole and put in a trowel full or 2 of multi purpose compost mixed with some slow-release fertiliser and prized out the plant and root ball very carefully. Most did not come out as a clean, pot shaped compost ball. My 2 year old, ever the adventurous and inquisitive chap he is, came along and very gently but definitely lifted out a plant by the stem and out it came, smoothly and cleanly with a perfect root ball! Next year I think I’ll get him on board with planting. Once again a good watering-in session followed by slug pellet sprinkling ensued.