Hello lovely people! Lots going on…
Our seed orders haven’t arrived yet but we’re dying to get our hands dirty, so we decided to plant some things that we collected ourselves last year (Orlaya grandiflora and Verbena bonariensis), something that we helped ourselves to at the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen (Potentilla gracilis var. nutallii) and the primulas we bought in the UK over Christmas:
There’s a lot of conflicting info out there about germination methods. We’ve tried many different ones over the years – here are two examples. If seeds need stratification (a cold period necessary to break dormancy) we find that sowing in normal seed compost and chucking them into the shed for a couple of months seems to work well. Primulas are new to us, so we’re trying one pot in the shed and two in the house. We’ll keep you posted on what works best.
JD has been dying to get the meadow beds mowed to give our self-sown annuals a chance to germinate before the grass swamps them, so the riding lawn mower made its first appearance of the year:
One very important note – they need to be thoroughly raked over to get rid of the clippings.
Finally, something that makes us very, very happy:
At least two of our cyclamens made it through the winter!!! (You might want to click to enlarge the images – the leaves are still teeny-tiny – smaller than the nail on your little finger.) The seeds came from a mix of hardy varieties, so we’ll probably have to wait until they bloom before we can identify them.
Lots of birdsong too – mostly tits – plus several magpies squabbling over either mates or territory. Spring is definitely on its way.