Hey oh! Another Bank Holiday weekend looms. Please don’t get me wrong, I love long weekends, in fact I live for long weekends. At the moment it feels as though we have nothing but Bank Holiday weekends, the UK has 9 Bank Holiday weekends in 2011, and that includes the day given for the Royal Wedding. It feels like a lot more at the moment, we had three in April, and two in May. Then we have to wait until 29 August for the next one, to be followed by the last two over Christmas. Wouldn’t it be great to have them spread out evenly? This Bank Holiday weekend, known as ‘Spring Bank Holiday’, I am making a Things to Do List. In order to name and shame, I have decided to publicly announce my list, so if I don’t do these jobs I will have to give an excellent reason for not achieving four simple tasks.
Job #1 is my Larkspur – I need to re-pot these, but with great care. Daughter No. 2 is getting married in July and she read that Larkspur is lucky to have in a July wedding bouquet. However, I am a little cautious because when I looked up the meaning of Larkspur, it seems to depend on the colour. Pink means fickleness (we don’t want that do we?), but white is happy-go-lucky with purple meaning happy disposition. So I am hoping that when they flower there will be lots of white and purple.
Next is job #2 – planting out the Rudbeckia and Cornflower. I have been waiting for the end of May, lest we have frost. Well that’s been a joke, the weather in this South East corner of the UK has been very much warmer and drier than usual. My clay soil is rock hard. I suffer from arthritic wrists and when taking a trowel to a solid flowerbed it can jar and be quite painful.
Cornflower
I long to garden in the rain. Good old drenching, wet, straight down like stair rods, rain. You know the kind that runs off the bottom of your jacket and soaks your trousers just above the knees. No chance of that this weekend, the forecast is stuck on “Mainly dry for the South East”.
So, job #3 is to put the tomatoes into bigger pots and place them in situ for the rest of the summer. These are Gardner’s Delight. I had intended to grow several varieties, including Sun Gold, but somehow that just hasn’t happened. I will just have to do some swaps with friends.
Gardeners Delight
Talking about tomatoes! Some rogue plants have appeared in a plant trough. They are not supposed to be there leaving me a little mystified, but they are going to have to go. This trough is a bit of a mess. I put a couple of Begonia bulbs in there earlier this year. Big blousey apricot coloured hanging basket Begonias. I bought them from Wilkinsons ages ago and threw them in the pot with the good intention of dealing with them, then I forgot. Now they are all clogged up with weeds, and what I think is Night Scented Stock, because that’s what was in there last year. Job #4 is to transplant the Begonias into a hanging basket by the front door, hoping they are happy with the move.
One job I don’t have to do this weekend is throw my Oleander on the dump. It has grown happily for several years but, sadly, in the last few weeks, all the leaves went brown, withered and fell off. It looked decidedly dead, but surprise, surprise, right down at the bottom new life has appeared. Isn’t nature just wonderful!
