LindaMae's Journal

We have honey fungus! Apparently it’s quite common for SE England. When I read the information about how to detect it, it all starts to fall into place – trees and woody shrubs dying off over the space of several years. Particularly prone are plum and apple trees, forsythia, currant b...

This has stopped flowering and I’ve brought it in for the winter – dithering over where it should live – maybe upstairs because that will give it more light. I’ve pruned if fairly lightly with the intention of pruning harder in the spring when it goes outside again.

This has been out of the front windowsill all summer and is looking much better, darker green leaves, much bushier.

I’ve kept one of these on the front windowsill while it looked unlikely to survive and against all odds it has revived and is flowering beautifully.

Well sadly this died off. I’m quite surprised because the larger blue flowering kind seems to flourish in this garden.

Not a brilliant crop of garlic. One head for each clove planted, but mostly very small. I seemed to keep finding things out along the way, but just a little too late. So it sounded like a grand idea to use the leaves, which had a good flavour and which I liked, but then later I read that using to...

It’s possible that I was less than careful with the seed I now have salad leaves growing through the bricks.

This tarragon is taking over the herb pot completely it’s now sprouting out of 4 different places. I have cut it right down today and dried as much as I can to give to my daughter for use in her catering endeavours. The attempt to take cuttings came to nothing – they seemed to be fine...

We spied a visiting frog the other day. He was much bigger and beefier than our usual little friend, darker in colour too, and I’m assuming he was the one I saw some while ago under the fruit trees because after a while he stopped his bathing, climbed out and took a number of huge leaps bac...

…first sighting of a stag beetle this year. I wasn’t here, my other half saw it just in the middle of the grass lumbering along. My journal from last year with pics is here: http://myfolia.com/journals/21509-stag-beetle-x-2

This has made it’s way up the fence to the top, and woven nicely around the trellis on the way. There are a good few buds so it looks likely to flower this first year despite my initial misgivings – BUT I found 2 smallish vine weevils on it a couple of days ago. I had been trying to w...

..and they are lovely but I’m not really happy with the way this plant looks, Leaves a bit too yellow, and still with black spots despite regular treatment, plant just not very bushy ad healthy looking. I wonder if it’s too crowded in there.

I am very fond of salad, and am renowned amongst my family for consuming unfeasibly large amounts at one sitting. So as these things go this is not a massive harvest and I have even been just a bit generous with my estimates on the new impressive harvesting calculator. However it is a beginning f...

..with black fly – masses of them. This is what happened the last time – several years ago now – that I tried planting nasturtiums. I saw some last year though in a garden a few streets away and thought how nice they looked so I tried again. I’ve just spent a while painsta...

lovely – smallish flowers – but the first and I have always coveted irises

just a few flowers, but it’s quite bushy and fills out the plastic baskety thing so that’s good

This has a load of buds and 2 flowers came out yesterday. Last year the flowers came out and then almost immediately both leaves and flowers got eaten mainly by caterpillars and the plant looked really bedraggled. This year we cut down the over large straggly buddleia which I think provided too m...