This year, I was feeling positive about our garden. I was determined to again grow lots of delicious crops, but also to bring some colour in with lots of tall, bright flowers. I did my research and went online to source flowers which would grow tall and fill the garden with colour. I had a plan!
Walking around the garden now, I feel sad. The plan, thanks to dubious weather, my limited gardening skills and the appalling soil we have to put up with, has almost entirely failed.
We sowed some lupins, nurtured them in the greenhouse, planted them out... and the rabbits carefully deadheaded them:
Happily, on the other side of the garden, some are just about surviving in a tall pot, protected from marauding teeth. I'm praying they'll grow tall enough to flower before the summer ends.
As part of the grand plan, I had ordered some Alyssum seeds, and the picture on the front promised a sea of colour. Witness our sea of colour:
Can you see them? No? Let me get you a closer up image:
Now can you make them out? Now, I'm not denying that they're pretty... they're quite beautiful. They're just not really standing up to the sea of mud and rubble. A little too delicate.
The snapdragons, which were supposed to be 70-90cm tall, have just about made it to 10cm, and look like they might consider flowering, if pushed. None of the other seeds even survived the greenhouse stage. Very sad. I tried so hard.
It's not all bad though. Mum brought me some Cosmos from her garden. Then all of hers were eaten by slugs. The vast majority of ours were carefully deadheaded by the darling bunnies, but some have survived. We even have three currently flowering at the same time!
Very pretty.
And the purple-leafed, yellow-flowered plant that we transplanted from Mum's garden last year is having a ball of a time, lighting up various areas of the garden:
But the weeds are just an endless battle. So few plants survive in the rubble and sand that the flowerbeds are 80% mud, which needs constant weeding.
I really wish Alan Titchmarsh and his 'Love Your Garden' team would come and rescue us. We've done our best, but we just don't know enough about gardening to make it look as beautiful as it could. I so desire a beautiful garden, but whatever I do it doesn't seem to happen. *Sigh*
Well that was a negative post, wasn't it? I'm not in a bad mood, I promise! I've had a really lovely day. I just want rescuing from our gardening predicament. I need a garden miracle!