And then it was September. Where did August go, surely it had only just arrived. Not a lot of gardening has been done because not a lot has been possible. Summer is gone, there has been plentiful rain, my water storage is full and parts of the garden are slowly mouldering back into the ground.…Continue reading ➞ Six on Saturday – 6/9/2025| garden ruminations
Another month has passed so another allotment post is due. I’ve been looking at some veg growing stuff on YouTube and there is a wealth of advice about what to do and how to do it, not all of which I’d agree with. What I am aiming to do is to look backwards over the…Continue reading ➞ Allotment update – 1/9/2025| garden ruminations
There have been early signs of autumn for the last couple of weeks, easy enough to ignore for those so minded. That changed on Wednesday with the arrival of the remains of hurricane Erin, even though it never came very close to the UK. We’ve had rain, quite a bit, and I’ve been scurrying about…Continue reading ➞ Six on Saturday – 30/8/2025| garden ruminations
It’s beginning to look as if summer hits the buffers next Tuesday, with a big Atlantic low incorporating the remains of Hurricane Erin arriving. I feel like a dying man in a desert eking out …| garden ruminations
4 posts published by Jim Stephens during August 2025| garden ruminations
There’s no escaping the fact that midsummer is well behind us and the days are getting shorter. Our garden openings are behind us, or so we thought before we were asked if we would have a small group, just four, round on Monday. The forecast for the weekend is warm, sunny and windy, not the…Continue reading ➞ Six on Saturday – 16/8/2025| garden ruminations
Our penultimate garden open was yesterday, the final one today. We had a fair turnout yesterday and would normally expect more on Saturday than Friday, so finishing on a high.In spite of many weeks…| garden ruminations
August. I was talking with my neighbour on the allotment earlier about how much of the growing season was left and whether seeds I’d sown a month ago would yield a crop. A day earlier I was talking to the neighbour on the other side about autumn sowing annual flowers in cells under cover to…Continue reading ➞ Six on Saturday – 2/8/2025| garden ruminations
A month ago I had just taken on another half plot, cleared a section of it and sown seeds of carrots, beetroot, perpetual spinach, chard, spring onions and lettuce. All but the lettuce germinated, mostly within a week to ten days. Emergence was a little patchy and in the weeks since the rows have become…Continue reading ➞ Allotment update – 1/8/2025| garden ruminations
Let’s not beat about the bush, I am well and truly pissed off. Last week I reluctantly dug out and got rid of an Agapanthus that had become quite seriously infested with Agapanthus gall midge, causing its flower buds to become distorted or destroying them completely. There is no treatment available, as far as I…Continue reading ➞ Grrrr!! (Agapanthus gall midge)| garden ruminations
The garden is beginning to look a little tired. It needs a really good downpour and none is in prospect. Then there’s the problem with Agapanthus, gall midge, which seems to have infected every Agapanthus plant I have. This morning I went around searching for and snipping off all the shoots I could find that…Continue reading ➞ Six on Saturday – 26/7/2025| garden ruminations
I’m not getting any younger and my memory is not what it was. I like to keep track of the names of the many plants that I grow and I am not very good at doing so. The simplest and safest way …| garden ruminations
4 posts published by Jim Stephens during April 2025| garden ruminations
5 posts published by Jim Stephens during June 2025| garden ruminations
6 posts published by Jim Stephens during July 2025| garden ruminations
Wednesday was a day of almost constant drizzle which by Thursday morning was registering 7.5mm of rain in the rain gauge. Even so, such is the total area of roofs from which I collect rainwater tha…| garden ruminations
Oh dear, doesn’t time fly. My last post on ferns was in May 2022, more than three years ago. Since then I have lost a few and added a few, plus I have three years more experience of all the r…| garden ruminations
Friday evening again, on a very warm day that it seems wrong to complain about, given how few of them we get, so I’ll say nought more about it. We are having to do a lot of watering and are g…| garden ruminations
We are opening our garden on eight days this summer under the NGS, in four sets of two consecutive days. Our latest was the 3rd and 4th of July and this video is for those of you who were unable to…| garden ruminations
Summer trundles on, doing its summery thing. Back in the 1980’s our garden was literally the corner of a meadow, though there is very little evidence left now. The farmer whose land it was is…| garden ruminations
I suspect that if I look in my draft posts folder that there will be one from earlier this year about my allotment. I’m sure I at least started such a thing and I would be unsurprised if I ne…| garden ruminations
Nearly the end of June, high summer. I’m more or less into a ticking over phase, everything is planted and growing, it just needs watering and tying and tweaking to give of its best. It looks…| garden ruminations
One more hot day and then it cools down. I’m not a heat lover, 21°C is about my ideal; today’s 27°C was something of a slog. Gardening as an active pursuit goes on, we’ve three mo…| garden ruminations
On Friday and Saturday we opened our garden under the National Gardens Scheme. I wanted to do a snapshot of how it looked for our visitors so I attempted to walk most of the paths in the garden in …| garden ruminations
6 posts published by Jim Stephens during March 2025| garden ruminations
Friday evening, still raining, as it has since about 1pm. Three couples braved the weather and visited the garden, three more than we had expected. Tomorrow should be better. Our antipodean visitor…| garden ruminations
Flaming June! Huh! We have family over from Australia and while we were never going to compete with their weather, we could have done without the demo of a proper Cornish summer. The garden is lovi…| garden ruminations
We’re just about to move into meteorological summer so I suppose if you don’t have six things happening in your garden now then the only reason you’re reading this is for the vica…| garden ruminations
I was finally paying attention today when the sun reached the point it was running directly down the side of the house, i.e. at a right angle to the front wall. Bang on noon. Any plant close to tha…| garden ruminations
The house painting is finished but the scaffolding is still up, so while the chaos has receded a little, we are far from back to normal. It looks like we have another week of sunny weather before a…| garden ruminations
We have a man painting the house, so scaffolding up and everything near to the house moved away. It’s chaos, and I don’t cope well with chaos not of my making. A week ago we had a fortn…| garden ruminations
Just another week? Well not quite. On May 6th 2017 this post appeared on The Propagator, a blog I’d been following for a while. Scroll down to the comments section and you will see that I ros…| garden ruminations
We have a mini heatwave forecast for the coming week, with two days expected to reach the dizzy heights of 22°C. then going back down to maximums of 15°C by next weekend. It’s no wonder the w…| garden ruminations
It’s raining. Our second full day of rain this week. The first was enough to refill all my water storage; this second lot will make sure the ground is well and truly soaked ready for a surge …| garden ruminations
The weather is set to change, essentially returning to normal; cooler with showers. It’s getting rather dry out there so a bit of rain will be welcome, so long as it knows when to stop. The f…| garden ruminations
After last week’s excitement I am quite happy to report that this week has been relatively uneventful. Things are growing, the garden gets greener by the day. There will never be a better tim…| garden ruminations
Sometimes (rarely, it has to be admitted) my life horticultural (retired) goes through a frenetic patch. Like this week; Wednesday evening, talk to garden club (Camellias); Thursday and Friday, fil…| garden ruminations
It seems stupid to be saying so, but the modest amount of rain we had today was very welcome. It’s not that the ground is dry, just that if it does turn dry very early I worry that when growt…| garden ruminations
We’ve had nearly a week of cold nights, with frost forecast but not materialising to a significant degree. Tonight and tomorrow fit the same pattern, then it warms up a little. Sadly, it curr…| garden ruminations
Our garden is plagued by slugs. I could just ignore them and eventually nature would control their numbers. The problem is that the means by which that plays out is that the slugs gorge themselves …| garden ruminations
If Sue had still been in Australia she would around about now be experiencing the calm in the eye of a cyclone, in that the forecast track of Alfred is right over the top of where she was staying. …| garden ruminations
Oh my! I just witnessed a seismic geopolitical moment and I have to calm down and write a blog about things happening in my garden. By any real world standard, absolutely nothing is happening in my…| garden ruminations
Now that we are done with opening the garden for this year, it can slide into autumnal disarray without us feeling the need to put up much resistance. Growth this year has been particularly lush so…| garden ruminations
We have just had a lovely sunny day with the garden open and it has now clouded over, is drizzling and the forecast for tomorrow, when we are also open, is for rain all day.On a much more positive …| garden ruminations
Mid July and still the weather persists with being cool and wet. Looking at pictures from the same time last year I see there is a lot less in flower, in particular Cosmos and Cleome, which are way…| garden ruminations
I’m getting a bit ahead of myself in that I’m writing this on Thursday, mainly because we have visitors coming tomorrow for the weekend. Barring disasters, what is happening on Thursday…| garden ruminations
Nine months on from my last posting on Begonias and it seems a good time to put some notes together by way of an update. My collection has come through another winter and has been added to both by …| garden ruminations
The Propagator, who started this meme back in May 2017, wrote a participant guide in September 2017. It’s still on his website, here, but I thought I would duplicate it on this site in case y…| garden ruminations