The potager in late spring

 Late spring, almost summer. I love this time of year. It's daylight all the time, almost. Early mornings are a joy. 

 The potager is a tranquil sea of green and purple. Pansies are still turning their cheerful faces to the sun. Even though they are smothering the lavender I let them be.

 I grew all my dwarf lavender from seed since I want to use it to edge the potager. I sowed a few plants in spring last year to see how it went, and then sowed a big tray later in the summer. The spring-born plants are well ahead... bushy and covered with flower heads. The little seedlings I planted out in autumn have struggled a bit, and the ones I grew on in pots in the glasshouse and planted out this spring have done better. Hopefully this time next year they will all have filled in and be flowering well.

 Chives edge the main path. Bees love the flowers. I'll have to cut them back soon, or they'll self seed everywhere, and baby chives are hard to pry from between bricks!

 This is a sea of Desiree potatoes. They won't be far off, I hope. The carrots were sown last autumn, and have now decided to flower.

Soon the season will heat up and things will start to brown off. I'm enjoying the freshness and cool colour palette while it lasts.

Something is eating my strawberries...

... and it's not me! I see no evidence of slugs or snails and birds don't go in the glasshouse. Earwigs maybe? Those little buggers are difficult to eradicate. I had a quick spray with pyrethrum and topped up the neem granules, so I hope that works. Whoever is scarfing these berries is not even waiting until they are fully ripe, so they are getting in before I do. And it's making me MAD!

Happy hangers

I recently acquired some old wooden coat hangers, with the intention of padding them up with some nice crochet jackets. I never have enough coat hangers in my wardrobe and had been reduced to using horrible thin plastic ones. So I looked up the Happy Hanger pattern by Dottie Angel. 

 The pattern didn't work very well for me at first, as you can see from the purple hanger in the background. It s t r e t c h e d so much going onto the hanger. So I made the following adjustments...

Ch 63, work first dc cluster in 3rd ch from hook. Skip 1 ch, sc, skip 1 ch, dc cluster into next ch. And so on. I ended up with 16 scallops on my piece.

I love the way these turned out... and best of all my cardies won't be stretched and puckered from the sharp edges of plastic hangers.

November flowers

This month we have the last of the spring beauties. Petals begin to fade and curl and foliage droops, but the summer stalwarts are popping up and so the spotlight shifts. I've had a few roses so far but it's mainly buds still on the bushes. When I pick them too early for vases they don't open properly so I need to be patient, which is easier said than done. The glorious pink rhododendrons are all finished now but the delphiniums are in their prime. Smiling pansy faces are everywhere.

This is the first rose bouquet of the season. The tall flower is verbascum, which is making a good show in the garden this year and lasts well in the vase. Carnations make good fillers and, I must admit, smell better than my roses do. One of these days I'll find one that's perfectly scented.

How is your flower garden this November? Have a look at Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day to see what is blooming around the world.

Hall table display

This is how I styled my hall table last week. The azaleas (rhododendrons?) are beautiful but so short lived. They last a day or two in the vase and a week or two on the bush. Then the show's over. Not really worth it in my opinion; they are pretty but something more long lasting could be growing there. 

The lace on the silky mat is obviously handmade but I'm not sure how. It's not crochet or tatted... maybe it's actual bobbin lace? The embroidery is a practice one I made a couple of years ago. It was a prototype for something but I don't remember what now. 

First

The first rose to open fully was Sexy Rexy, just in time for the first of the month. I'd already impatiently cut the first bud from Queen Elizabeth but it's still sitting regally in a bottle vase, the petals just beginning to uncurl. The Sexy Rexy bud had frost burn on some of the petals, but it's not noticeable now that it's open. And there are several others on the bush poised to unfurl.

I've already been eating the first strawberries for about a week.  This is one of the things I love best about summer... going outside first thing in the morning to pick fresh berries for my breakfast. Hopefully it won't be too long until I'm picking fresh tomatoes for lunch!

The garden is filling out

I love October in the garden. Fresh growth is everywhere, everything is filling out and if it's not blooming now, I know it soon will be. I'm so pleased with the progress of the curved garden, it's getting ever closer to the show garden of my dreams... Just needs a bit more height in there to hide the fence a bit more.

I put some terracotta long tom pots at the front of the garden. They act as a focal point, since many of the flowers have a similar hazy, cloudlike appearance from a distance. I'd like some topiary balls in these pots, possibly the NZ Cranberry/Chilean Guava (myrtus ugni). While I don't like to eat those berries, they give off the most delicious candy floss scent in summer. And stay evergreen in winter.

In the potager the chives are lining the paths with their purple fuzzy heads. Remind me to dead-head this year, or I'll end up with millions of baby chivelings trying to grow through the bricks.

I'm counting down the days to the first rose opening... it may even be this weekend! I think Sexy Rexy would be blooming by now but a late frost has shrivelled her first flower. Queen Elizabeth has a perfectly shaped bud almost open. Maybe tomorrow? Let's hope for some sunshine to bring her out.

Sorting out the glasshouse

 It's Labour Weekend, which is the traditional time for planting out your summer crops like tomatoes, zucchinis and capsicums. However our weather has been all over the place - it was warm and summery today, but yesterday there was a frost, and a cold front is meant to blow in tonight - so I'm keeping my precious babies under glass for a few more weeks.

 I did pot up the tomatoes and capsicums who will be permanent glasshouse residents, and that required a bit of a reshuffle inside. Some of the tender plants who were overwintering under glass have had to make way.

 So far in pots I have seven tomatoes, five capsicums, two pots of mesclun lettuce and three gherkin vines. There are also all the punnets of seedlings I'm still raising. I grew all the tomatoes but one from seed, as well as the lettuce and gherkins, but I bought the capsicums as seedlings. I find them too fiddly to raise from seed without a heat mat or something, they take forever to come up so it's just easier to buy them as seedlings. Same for chillis, pumpkins and zucchini (although I have got a pot of zucchini seeds nestled in the compost bin, where it gets really warm, to see how they go).

My wooden chair still fits at this stage, and so does the Cat Mat and the Saucer. Mr Lui likes a selection of sleeping spots, and gave me the dirtiest of dirty looks when everything was out on the grass while I moved pots around. I managed to fit them both back in, luckily for me. Today he was sleeping in the glasshouse where it was around 30 degrees, and as he got too hot he would get up and move from the Saucer to the Cat Mat, stretch out, get too hot again, move back to the Saucer, stretch out, etc.

Little green strawberries are forming in the strawberry baskets. One has the faintest blush on it. Not long now...

October flowers

The bright days of spring are here. Freesias, ranunculus, azaleas and blossom provide fragrance and colour. It's joyful to pick a small posy for a vase which will then scent the hallway or kitchen. These beauties are fleeting so I enjoy them as fully as I can.

How is your garden on Garden Blogger's Bloom Day?

Spring showers

 The unsettled weather of spring has continued, with wind, rain, sun and storms frequently throughout the course of a single day. Currently the lawn is sprinkled with discarded blossom petals which blew down in the storm that raged for most of the weekend. Now the clouds have cleared and hot sun is shining, all the better to germinate my newly sown lawn seed.

 The potager is still producing steadily. I'm harvesting carrots, leeks, 'Purplette' onions, lettuce, silver beet, spring onions and herbs. I've planted my seed potatoes and sown peas and snow peas. I've got bean seeds to sow and tomato and pepper seedlings to go out when the weather is settled.

In the glasshouse I've already potted up tomatoes and peppers, and I have gherkins ready to be potted. The strawberries are blooming and tiny green fruits are forming. I have two pots of peas slowly succumbing to mildew. The pods are now ready so I'll harvest those, then the gherkins can go in their place.

 The silver beet in the potager is getting ready to bolt to seed, as it always does in October. I need to thin these pansies and phacelia out but I just can't bring myself to - they are good for the bees so it's good companion gardening!

 The curved garden I extended last year is filling in. The mounds of geranium, catmint and lambs ears are a good ground cover, and as the summer progresses the taller plants will appear - verbascum, sweet peas, dahlias and chrysanthemums. 

There are still a few pops of colour from the ranunculus. In the back left corner is a new delphinium, Astolat, which has held its own against the wind.

I'm off to put on my sun hat and windproof coat to plant out the next batch of spring onions. Hope you're having fun in your garden this weekend.