The good thing about macro lenses is that they really let you get a sense of how the world works for very small things. To you, the garden’s an ornamental green space you’ve spent a long time carefully cultivating; to bees, it’s just another day at the office.
(The bad thing about macro lenses is that they make you want to pat bumblebees.)
“Hello! Nice macro lens you’ve got there. I understand you’re looking to take photographs of bees? Perhaps I can help with this! Because I, after all, am a bee myself.”
“See? I am yellow with black stripes, I have big eyes, and I go bzzzzzzz when I fly. I am absolutely, positively, 100%, a bee since the day I was born. Which was in a hive, obviously. Or am I a wasp? Okay, possibly I’m a wasp. But I’m definitely one of the two!”
“Look at my shape! Look at those colours! I could absolutely sting you if I wanted to, you know. That’s what all the bzzzzzing is for. To warn you. Because I can sting people. Yeah, whatever I am, I can definitely do the stinging thing.”
“ALL RIGHT FINE FINE I’m a hoverfly. Are you happy now? Are you satisfied? I hope you are. I am a member of the genus Syrphidae, where we have spent millions of years learning to look exactly like bees and wasps. We have all the colours! We have all the style! We even go bzzzzz! And yet, you’re only taking pictures of me because you couldn’t find a bee. Oh don’t even try to defend yourself. I don’t want to hear it. Go and find your bee, if it means that much to you.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what that was all about, but I’m not a bee either. Also this is a rather unflattering angle. Try the next plant?”
“Bzzzzzzzz.”
Mid-heat-wave here in Glasgow, and we’ve gone from rain and grumpiness to sun-cream, sandals and a slightly reduced level of grumpiness. Except for those of us who get to work from home, who have been quite happy sitting in the garden reading while eating Magnums. (If it is any consolation, I was reading exam scripts.)
Everything in the garden, meanwhile, is deliriously happy with the weather. Here’s the aquilegia the day before yesterday, looking shy and demure:
And here it is today, looking downright extravagant:
I am impressed. (Now, if it could only persuade the bees to hang around long enough for me to get out there with the macro lens…)
The weather recently has not been filled with the joys of spring. Instead it’s been mostly filled with the joys of howling winds and bitter-cold rainstorms, especially the kind that follow sunny spells lasting juuuuuuuuust long enough to tempt you outside in sandals. Of which we’ve had three. Calling this ‘spring’ is, at best, optimistic.
But whether humans consider this spring or not is largely irrelevant to plants. Plants just carry on with whatever they were going to do anyway, growing and flowering and fading away again on their own time. So it’s a surprise to see, in between all my grumbles about how this surely can’t count as spring, that spring is ticking along nicely as far as the garden’s concerned. Today, I noticed for the first time that the snapdragons were flowering, and the aquilegia had grown about a foot since the last time I looked, and there’s a little blue anemone thing coming up behind the rosemary, and some weird big possibly-foxglove-but-probably-not plant growing near the violas, and yes, spring is well and truly underway, whether I noticed it or not.
And as spring giveth, spring taketh away. Specifically, it hath taken away my most beautiful and favourite tulips, the flowers I loved more than anything else in the garden. I knew they couldn’t last forever, but still… I wish I’d stopped bitching about the rain long enough to say goodbye.
See you next year, tulips.
All except the carrots. See, the carrots are outside now, in their own tub, growing up on their own, wearing unsuitable clothing and listening to their bands. I went out there to take photos but they just glared at me and muttered under their breaths about how embarrassing it was. I think they might have been smoking.
So yeah, no carrot pictures. Let’s look at the cute plants instead!
Cucumbers, winning the award for Leaf Shape I Was Least Expecting. Would you look at that! It’s the seedling equivalent of getting a Mohican.
Rocket, winning the It Turns Out That Wasn’t Damping Off After All Then trophy. (But it looked so like it! Weird. Anyway, well done that rocket.)
Sweet peppers, winning at being small but perfectly formed.
Onions, winning at interpretative dance.
Lettuce: Champion Cup, Most In Need Of Thinning Out (Lanarkshire), 2012.
The tomatoes that won my heart.
Well, they’ve been outside day and night for a few days, but now they’re hung up in their final position. Unless the weather suddenly turns colder (in which case they’re coming back inside, because nothing in there is frost-resistant other than the ivy and I would cry sad tears if everything in there died), they’re out there for the rest of the year.
Our house is built into the side of a hill, and the brick wall where the hanging baskets live divides the level of the ground floor from the level of the first floor and garden, like so:
Even though the wall they’re against is sheltered and tucked into an alcove, it’s south-facing and gets a decent amount of sun. The lower basket will get slightly less, so hopefully the fuschias in there won’t have conniptions about needing more shade.
It’s nerve-wracking finally putting them out properly, though. They are so small! And so delicate! And they’ll either grow or they won’t, and there’s really very little I can do about that beyond giving them sunlight and water and fertiliser and protecting them from the worst of the elements. There wasn’t much I could do about it when they were inside, either, but somehow keeping them inside gives the illusion of control in a way that putting them outside doesn’t. I can’t control the rain or the temperature out here; I can’t keep insects and other plant-munching beasties off them (although slugs and snails are the worst culprits and they’re going to have a struggle getting there anyway); I can’t make sure the neighbours don’t inadvertently harm their self-esteem. This bothers me.
I also planted the sweet peas out in one of the proper beds, against a wall that’s already covered with a kind of wooden mesh they’ll hopefully enjoy climbing up. Some of them look great and are already reaching the lower part of the mesh, but others look a great deal less enthusiastic about this whole growing business. Hopefully they’ll get used to their new home sooner rather than later, because I’ll feel like a total gardening failure if I can’t even get sweet peas growing.
The beds where the sweet peas live are technically part of the communal garden that adjoins ours, so we share them with four different sets of neighbours. The landlord had always taken care of them before us, and so we dug out the weeds and planted some violas in there last autumn (still going strong, too; violas are amazing). Two new sets of neighbours have moved in since then, though, and both are quite keen on gardening, so I do feel a bit guilty about having claimed those beds when we already have a bit of garden of our own. Not that anyone’s objected, mind – they all seem quite happy with the rest of the garden, and hey, who could object to a nicely-weeded bed of colourful violas? – but still. I assuage my guilt by lending out garden implements and giving seedling tours to the three-year-old who lives upstairs.
Everything is up and growing and green and wonderful now. It’s still a little too early to plant things outside – we probably won’t get any more frosts, but I’ve seen snow in April before – so at the moment all the vegetables are still living indoors, and probably getting less light than they could do with. Still, they seem to be growing well enough.
The rocket (in the fibre pots above) is the only one I’m really worried about. Yesterday some of the seedlings started to wilt, and on closer inspection it looked worryingly like damping off, which could rapidly wipe out the entire seed tray of my much-loved, much-cherished little seedlings. Because it is a fungal infection, and fungi HAVE NO CONSCIENCE.
Anyway, I took out all the collapsing seedlings and thinned out the rest, and the rocket’s looked just fine since. Maybe not damping off, then? Or maybe I’ll still be able to save some? Not optimistic, though. Hopefully the ones already transplanted to pots above will be fine, even if I lose the rest – and at least rocket grows quickly enough that it wouldn’t be a huge loss to replant it.
The lettuce is doing really well. It could do with some thinning out now, lest the stems merge to become one super-dense rectangular lettuce mass that will achieve sentience or something, but I’ve put it off because honestly I sort of feel like a murderer thinning out seedlings. I know, I know, it’s good for them and I couldn’t plant all these lettuces anyway and damping off is more likely when they’re overcrowded. I should get to it. Maybe tomorrow.
The cucumber seedlings are growing like magic beanstalks. Really impressed with how well they’re doing, particularly because it turns out cucumber seedlings really don’t like being transplanted at all and have a tendency to wither and die if you try. (Obviously I found this out after merrily planting them in seed trays, which will teach me to do my research beforehand in future). But here they are, transplanted and growing like crazy.
Sweet peppers are growing less like crazy since they were transplanted, which is a shame and worried me quite a bit for a while. I’m about 90% convinced I overwatered them by accident after transplanting, and they just didn’t do much growing for a good while afterwards. But they seem to have regained their enthusiasm now. Tiny baby true leaves!
Tomato plants are growing away happily and efficiently, too. Heaven only knows what I’m going to do with all the ones I don’t have room for. Hey, maybe all the wedding guests can go home holding a tomato plant!
These are carrots, which again, really really don’t like being transplanted, and thus are probably going to produce evil twisted forked mutant carrots in the future. Ah, well. At least they’re growing fine now.
And onions! I am a bit worried about the onions, too, because onion seedlings seem so pathetically inefficient. They come through in bent-over loops because they can’t quite break away from the seed husk, and then proceed to bend over more and more until the non-root end pings free, with the black rotting seed husk still attached. There are better ways to do this, onions! Anyway, the advice I read seemed divided on whether or not it would help to snip the loops, so I snipped the loops of half the seedlings and will see how they do comparatively.
These are some of the snipped-off onion loops, seed husks attached. Lovely. But it turns out that cutting through onion seedlings makes the entire room smell of chives, so the onions might claw themselves back into my favour yet.
The cucumber seedlings on day 9:
Looking good! Better than expected, in fact; I wasn’t planning on seeing all of them germinate, so probably I’m going to be handing out cucumber plants to friends and family and neighbours and colleagues and passers-by who don’t walk away fast enough in months to come.
The hanging baskets and the plants for my window-boxes are still being gradually hardened off to prepare them for the outside world. They’re now up to spending a full day outside and only coming in at night, so I put them out before going to work and bring them in again when it starts getting dark. Alas, today brought heavy cold rain and hail showers right after this morning’s glorious sunshine, which wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. Poor little plants are looking a bit betrayed and disappointed in me now.
Decorating my study, which is really just a tiny Ikea desk + bookshelf crunched into the corner of a bigger room.
I got this from the orchid fair at the Botanic Gardens, which was amazing (and beat the wedding fair hands down). Stall after stall of orchids, along with cacti and a beehive behind perspex to show all the honeybees crawling industriously around. (Well… crawling around, anyway. On an individual scale they always look a bit aimless. But then, their strength doesn’t really lie on an individual scale.)
Anyway, there were a lot of orchids to pick from, but I fell in love with the colours of this one. The brown of the buds against the dark stems and the pale pink flowers is just gorgeous, and it looks great next to my desk.
Rocket, rocketing. (Ahaha.)
Lettuce, somewhat less enthusiastic. But still growing! The lettuce seedlings have also had some trouble casting off their seed husks, so many of them this morning looked like they were wearing really heavy hats and weren’t at all happy about it.
And cucumber! New today! (Okay, it doesn’t even really count as a seedling yet, but still.)
