My Garden

Growing things is so satisfying. I love getting my hands dirty and planting up pots and things. Unfortunately, pots are the limit of my garden because our landlord has the whole back yard decked.

That's not a problem though (although I often wish I didn't have to *buy* my soil), I enjoy the whole process of potting up something new and I often find an excuse to re-pot other plants, just to extend the experience.

Currently my potted garden looks brilliant! I have Sunflowers blooming (they need re-potting though) and Strawberries trying to take over the garden with their runners. My Lavender plant is going potty (I need to re-pot it again I think!)in front of Daniel's red Acer.

In the only proper planting bed I have, I've rescued a Pansy, a Primrose and a Jasmine from death on the compost heap and although they are attacked by slugs and snails, they are still trying to bloom!
I have a Mint plant and another herb attempting to shove each other out of the bed, a Potato Plant (Maybe I'll get potatoes this year) and my Sweet Pea plant is going crazy and trying to overtake the Ivy that was in there originally.

I'm already reaping the rewards for growing things - my strawberries have given me three days worth of breakfast already and they are still going. I'm hoping that the Sunflowers will produce lots of seeds because I want to dry roast them and use them as a snack over the winter.

I'm not the only one growing things though. P.T brought a plant home from school in the spring, so I re-potted it and now we have pods being produced from black and white flowers that the bumble bees adore. Both children have also grown Runner Bean Plants for the Barnados school competition - they didn't win; the school winner from year Four was 1 m 59 cm - but they had fun and assuming I can get a big pot, enough compost and some bamboo canes soon, we'll have runner beans to eat as well!

I want to get a pair of Patio Fruit Trees for next year. I have an apple tree that I grew from seed, but it's struggling to get any bigger and I'm not sure what's wrong. It's never produced any flowers either. I'm going to get another Apple tree and a Pear tree. I'd like a Patio Rose bush as well, sadly though, I have a dangerous habit of killing roses off - I can't even keep an indoor rose alive!

I can call myself an amateur gardener I think. There's lots of things that I want to do, but they'll have to wait until I have a garden of my own to love.