We’ve just bought our first house earlier this year and it has a small fenced off space out the back. It’s about 15ft by 15ft with a diagonal fence slicing the farthest left corner off… so there’s not a ton of space to work with, but it’s a very sweet little space all the same.
The ground is shingled (nightmare for heels AND plants alike) but container plants have been working quite well this far as the sun covers at least half of the garden for most of the day. We’ve so far stuck a small four chaired table in the middle of it and some half-moon baskets along the fence.
My very patient man (thanks Dan x) has been repeatedly dragged off to garden centres, B&Q and generally anywhere where I’ve seen plants sitting outside with price tags on. At the beginning we bought a bunch of annuals for the baskets, tempting me in with their bright colours and low maintenance demands. I’m not so much of a fan of them anymore.
They started off well but I wasn’t particularly educated on how big each would grow, to excited at the prospect of having nice new flowers and colour in the garden, and so I didn’t bother to find out if they’d grow straight up or wander off to the side like vines… two of the three baskets are alright as I just planted the plain marigold plants in them, but the third is doing a thing all of its own. The geraniums in it have been and gone (too bad, I liked those ones..), leaving a brown stick standing proudly in the air, the flowers on the right have decided they’d like to turn into a bush in mid-air, protruding far beyond any of the other flowers and the red flowers which I’ve completely forgotten the name of at the moment seemed to bloom for a day and then rot into brown droopy messes.
On the up side I’ve been growing a few trees, and I’m quite proud of them so far. One is my tiny but ever growing ‘Christmas Tree’ who was originally received through the post as a gift from a printing company that my boyfriend’s company uses. For some reason though he seems to have stopped growing upwards and would much more prefer to continue getting wider… I keep meaning to research that and see why that is. The other tree is my Bay tree. Unfortunately when I was getting the original cutting from my boyfriends mom I heard her incorrectly and thought she had said ‘Bailey Tree’ …. that would have been nice, sadly there is no such thing as a Bailey’s tree so I will have to continue to buy the heavenly drink from the off-licence. It’s been growing nicely though, the Bay tree, I even started marking its progress on its support stick every Sunday, it’s been doing about an inch to an inch and a half each week.
The other plant I have is a recent addition (also from Dan’s mom) is a tomato plant. It had three flowers on it when I first put it in the garden… two of which I sadly found had fell off because of the torrential rain England had a month ago, the third flower, to my further dismay, fell off when I touched it. Further on in the week I had just finished a load of laundry and Dan was taking it outside to set it up in the sun when the clothes horse snapped under the weight off the wet clothes, falling directly onto the tomato plant. The tomato plant now has one stem and no branches, although it’s been a couple of weeks now and new flowers have started to bloom… we may get tomatoes yet!