Quick Jobs

Just a brief potter outside after getting home tonight. I can't remember where they came from, but we had a pack of fifteen anemones sitting around, waiting to plant. I put them in a tub to soak for a day, and we've now planted these in the wall of the front garden, as a previous planting appears to have at least partly worked. We put a hundred in, in autumn 2010, and although they didn't show in 2011, they then appeared (to my great surprise) in spring 2012, and are back, flowering prettily, now.

I'm not sure all 100 have come up, I have to confess.

Anyway, another bunch are now in the lower bit of wall (towards the garage), in the hopes that one day they'll come up and add some spring colour.

I forgot to note that, on Sunday, we planted fifteen crocosmia ('Lucifer') in the pond garden, where the Christmas trees were heeled in until moving to the hillside two months ago.

Having left them until we could consider them together, we also decided what to do with the 'Stella' cherry and Victoria plum in the pond garden. The Stella had a number of branches from near the base, and so I've removed these. We'll train the leader to a 4-6 foot standard, which it's getting towards.

The Victoria's a bit trickier. It was pruned as a bush, I think, with the header cut at about a foot. It has a number of large-ish branches from this level, but none looks especially promising as a new standard trunk. One or two are nearly tall enough, but have a lot of dead-looking spurs at about the height I'd hope for new laterals, which isn't encouraging. By contrast, there are some lively looking stems, but they're fairly thin, and not very tall.

As plum pruning is safely accomplished until late in the year, we've decided to procrastinate. That is, to wait and see which of the stems shows good growth, and select a new leader based on that in the summer. Then we'll remove (or reduce) the rest, and train that stem in as a new trunk, aiming, again, for a 4-6 foot height.