Banjaxed And Bored

Yes, it’s pretty and, yes, why can’t we just enjoy it, but frankly more than a couple of days and the snow gets very boring. The jolly-ing effect on the nation  is of course great, especially when the sun streams down on the smiling shoppers from bright blue skies like it did on Saturday. But once Sunday gets here and you want to get on with stuff, it just becomes a pain.

My top priority at the moment is the polytunnel, still sitting in the field in soggy boxes with the ground too hard to dig.  I need it up soon - I really want to start sowing some seeds under cover this month. The antirrhinums and other slow-growing half-hardy annuals need an early start if I am to get anything more than a few weeks of flowers from them. And I want to sow some more sweet peas, as the autumn-sown plants down in the potting shed have frozen and defrosted so many times now that I’m not sure whether they’ll make it. Yes, I could sow stuff indoors, I suppose, but the erratic light levels you get on the windowsills means the seedlings are never as strong, retaining a certain legginess no matter how many times you pinch them out – and anyway, the potting compost is frozen solid.

So instead of getting on with sowing I’ve been getting organised. I’ve finally finished ordering seeds for this year and updated my reference chart (which I’m supposed to refer to constantly to get things right but which I normally only refer to try and work out why things went wrong), and there are some exciting new additions!

I’ve never grown tuberosas before – apparently they smell divine – but I’ve splashed out on a few bulbs, and I have also upped my lily collection. Both of these – in fact, most summer-flowering bulbs -are things that I could never have enough of but  they’re expensive to buy and with a bulb you get just the one flower a year, so it’s difficult to spend what little money I have on them when I could get a packet of cut-and-come-again seeds for the price of one bulb – no matter how much you tell yourself that in the long run they will be worth the extra outlay.

Polianthes tuberosa ‘The Pearl’

I’ve also managed to find some seeds for limonium latifolium – purple sea lavender – and orange carthamus, both of which I’ve been looking for ever since I first used them on my floristry course.

Limonium latifolium

 

 

                                                         Carthamus tinctorius ‘Goldtuft’

 

 

 

And, as part of my efforts to grow more perennials, I’ve ordered some seeds of Scabiosa ‘Fama’ – the perennial blue scabious you find in florists’ shops - to go with the fabulous tall annual pink and mauve scabious which were so successful last year.

       Scabiosa caucasia ‘Fama Blue’

And this is Didiscus caeruleus, a lovely blue, all the more valued for flowering late in the season when nearly everything else is red or orange.

                                                                                Didiscus caerulus

It’s all very exciting! And so now I’m sitting here hoping for rain in February – bizarre.

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