The plants in the photo were part of the second wave of planting. The first wave have already lost their flowers so we gave in to temptation and dug some up to have with dinner. Thankfully our neighbour had warned us that fresh spuds cook more quickly than the ones you buy in Sainsbury's and she was not wrong. They took no longer than the wee pan of frozen peas I was cooking. And they tasted absolutely wonderful, with a little bit of butter and some mint from the garden. I could have eaten an entire plate of those potatoes for dinner with nothing else. I now find myself fantasising about digging up more on our next visit....
What has also been fun with this garden is discovering the stuff hiding in there from before we bought the house. There was a tangled mass of vegetation in one corner of the little flower bed under the kitchen window which we found as we stripped out the mint which had run riot in there. We didn't know what it was but it looked like it had tendril-y things like a climber. So we stuck up some trellis, pulled the triffid off the ground and attached it. Then we forgot about it. When we arrived this weekend, it looked like this:
I still don't know what it is exactly (Isabelle?) but isn't it gorgeous? (Please ignore the dandelions either side. I pulled them out later. Honest.)And finally, when we dug over one of the vegetable plots and planted our courgettes and rocket and so on, we found a seedling growing that we didn't recognise. It wasn't anything we planted but it didn't look exactly weed-y either. So we decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and let it grow, see what it turned into. It turned into this:
It's a sunflower! Knowledgeable Neighbour tells us that the birds often drop the seeds from feeders and they grow where they fall. It's not interfering with the courgettes and stuff so we are happy to let it do its thing. Amazing that something so tall and sturdy can grown from a seed so small we didn't even see it when we dug the bed over!
The flowering vine is known in the U.S. as clematis. It's often planted with climbing roses, as it uses the roses as its trellis.
ReplyDeleteIt's known here as a clematis too. When I was young, it was pronounced "clemAYtis", but nowadays it seems to have morphed into "CLEmahtis". The Great Vowel Shift or something. (No, that's something else, one of those things that I used to know and have now forgotten.)
ReplyDeleteClematis. My mother had one that was her mother's that moved with us whenever we changed houses. In Canada we still say 'clem AH tis'. Wonderful plant and the flowers turn into enchanting swirls after they have bloomed.
ReplyDeleteI have new potato envy. and I love the juggling photos above.
Clematis. I never knew how to pronounce it. Now I really do not.
ReplyDelete