Two Weeks

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Just a short post today - over the last fortnight I took a series of photos of the planter on our patio with chives in. It's a kind of time lapse showing how they've gone from buds two weeks ago to fully flowering now.

This is two weeks ago, with one flower and lots of buds. The planter itself is an old iron barbeque that I mostly just leave from year to year doing it's own thing.

I don't want to disturb it too much because most of the bottom is filled with a thoroughly healthy nest of black ants. They don't do any harm in the garden, and they've never hurt me so I don't want to hurt them 🙂

Above is a photo from week ago; still lots of buds, but a few flowers popping up. The other plants in there are mostly self-seeded. They include some tall things that I need to look up to find out what they're called. There's also quite a lot of lemon balm, which I'm sure will go crazy later in the year. I haven't found a way to cook with it yet, but it smells wonderful if you crush a leaf up.

This was today, and the chives are now fully flowering. The bees love them !

The blue planter you can half see is growing some potatoes for us. Oh, and the wooden desk in the background is my old computer desk. I turfed it out onto the patio ready for the next trip to the council tip, but it's actually turned out to be an incredibly useful work surface.

I admit, my garden is a bit neglected - real life makes finding time to give it the love it needs hard. But nature has a way of making it interesting, and the local wildlife seems to like it (the amount of fox poo we find proves that !)

One neglected corner has done well. It's just a small patch of earth next to my office, but it's produced lemon balm, bluebells, lots of lovely forget-me-nots, and the first seedlings of some borage.

That's all for now - maybe over the Bank Holiday weekend I'll do some weeding and tidying up !



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4 comments
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Chive flowers are among my favourite flowers.

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Thanks for your reply ! They're beautiful flowers, and especially good for the bees. Once they start to fade, I'll shake the seeds out and spread a few in other parts of the garden just to make a few more for next year 😀

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That looks great! Good WILD variety is super healthy for the garden!

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Thanks - if I ever retire, I'll be able to get the garden back to what it ought to be. But in the meantime it behaves like a wildlife sanctuary, and we get all kinds of interesting and beneficial birds and insects. I'm hoping we'll see more stag beetles this year, they've become rare but I think the bark chips I put down to control weeds mulch down and get really attractive to the larvae.

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