Bring spring to your garden with Dobies

Spring is upon us, the nights are getting lighter, the sun has made a few joyous if fleeting appearances. There have even been a couple of warm days and it isn’t even the end of March!

I’m definately a winter hibernator and this combination has roused my mammalian instinct to move and stretch and leave the comfort of my burrow to go outside and see the flowers and foliage bursting into life! I love browsing seed catalogues at this time of year, it’s lovely to do a spot of yarden planning and think about what we could do with our little space.

I’m a keen yardener and JD is my budding apprentice. She’s a sucker for brightly coloured bedding plants and flowers, and I love how quickly pots can be populated on a budget. We’ve spent lots of time wandering through parks and countryside enjoying the daffodils, snowdrops and crocuses and have decided it’s time to get some new bedding plants for the yard to brighten things up.

crocus

JD loves blue Forget-Me-Not’s with their array of delicate blue and white flowers which provide great cover for the bare earth waiting to be populated with foliage at the end of winter. I’ve decided to go for some Polyanthus too, I just love the bright variety of colours. We found both on the Dobies website (much easier to look there than dragging JD out to the shop!)

We’re also thinking of getting a little plant house (we don’t have room for a green house) and hope to grow some tomatoes from seed as JD loves to eat them straight from the plant when they’re ripe. We’ll be looking back to the main Dobies site again soon to get started with planting veggies for the summer!

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Happy planting fellow yardeners!

Collaborative post: all views are my own

Wildflowers and whimsy

After a long month of travel which saw me make nine journeys totaling 1,200 miles by train I’ve really needed some time to get some paperwork done and get my thinking cap on from the comfort of home.

I decided when I took this new job that I would do one of two things on a daily lunch break 1) work on the yarden or 2) take a walk with my camera

I’m learning to shoot on manual and though I have a long way to go I’m especially enjoying photographing flowers of late.

My walks take me to this lovely green retreat at the end of our street

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I adore cowslips, this week the Mr bought me a locally grown pot of them too, so I can enjoy them when I look out of the window

 

cowslips

cowslip

Another yellow beauty, it doesn’t look like much but I’ve never had any success growing lilies in a pot until this year!

Look closely on the foliage though, I noticed this when I was editing the shots, and popped back outside to get a closer look…

lily

…scarlet lily beetles, mating carmine pests, they’ve not destroyed my lilies yet but I fear for them!

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Midweek I relaxed with tea made from our apple mint plant, I adore this Anthropologie spoon, cup and saucer, such a joy sparker! The plant is a cutting from our darling neighbour, I love it and hope it grows as strong as its parent plant which I’ve long admired!

tea

More yarden blooms

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More blossoms enjoyed on walks

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And then finally a few poorly days during the weekend, a very kind friend brought round some pastries, gratefully received and I feel blessed to know such a lovely lady :)

tea

Midwinter snowdrops

Ah the snowdrops are here, spring is coming, look lively!

Today J and I took a ‘snowdrop walk'; a see what we can spot walk, and it was lovely, crisp, bright and lots to find.

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Midwinter snowdrops

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snowdrops 2

A lucky find, a bat box that had come down in the woods and my nipper was quick to investigate!

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In a comedy of errors we returned home to tidy the yarden and discovered these growing in one of our own pots right under our noses; I have no recollection of planting them and they’re a bit sad looking, but snowdrops none the less!

snowdrops

We’ve some tidying up to do, but I’m pleased to see our summer garland is still standing!

muscari

yarden

It’s at the faded Ibiza chic stage!

garland

And the bamboo continues to do its thing much to my amazement after I feared I’d killed it off earlier last year!

bamboo

And finally, some cut snowdrops brought back from J’s Grandmother’s house for me, gorgeous!

snowdrops