We recorded 33 millimetres of rain in the end. That's a useful amount, an inch and a third in old money. To put it in context, our annual average total is around 500 to 550 millimetres, or 20 to 22 inches, or to put it another way, we've just had about six per cent of our annual rainfall in twenty-four hours. The garden already looks better for it, the plants more relaxed, and I can take a break from manoeuvring the hose round corners from one bed to the next. The top few inches of soil are suddenly miraculously soft, so that when weeding you've got a sporting chance of lifting the roots instead of just scraping at the top growth.
I busied myself pulling rye grass out of the bed in the meadow opposite the wildlife pond. Chopping the hedge back last winter has let more light in, and the occupants are looking happier than they were, but the planting is gappy, and where you leave gaps you will find weeds. The rye grass is a curse, a legacy of our first three months here, when the chap renting the next door field sowed it to a rye ley, and sowed our meadow too before we'd had time to fence it off, because he didn't know where the boundary was. At the time the Systems Administrator said that at least it was grass, but with the benefit of hindsight I should have bought a knapsack sprayer and bulk container of glyphosate that first summer and sprayed every last tuft to oblivion, or kicked up a fuss and insisted the farmer who'd trespassed on our land and sowed it without our permission did it for me. Rye is a horrible coarse grass, that never mows to a close sward, and where it flowers in the areas we keep as long grass it sends its seeds far and wide and clumps of the wretched stuff pop up all over the place.
I've got a motley collection of home propagated plants sitting by the greenhouse that are in urgent need of getting out of their pots and into the ground. There are Hemerocallis, a purple leaved Persicaria, mallows, red hot pokers, Crocosmia, and some Kalimeris incisa. They come from a variety of sources. The Hemerocallis started off as budding plantlets on the flower stems of stock I was tidying up at the plant centre after the flowers had finished. Some varieties, though by no means all of them, develop little clumps of leaves with a swollen base mid way up their flower stalks. Tidying the plants meant removing the old stalks and any dead leaves, but it seemed a waste to throw the plantlets on the compost heap, so I took them home and experimentally potted them up. The strike rate was pretty much one hundred per cent, making it one of the easiest propagation methods ever, as long as you have variety that makes plantlets in the first place. Most of mine are 'Chicago Knockout' (I think. They are labelled but I'm not going outside to look at them).
The Persicaria rooted themselves in the compost bin from cut stems I'd thrown in there when I was tidying up in the autumn. I found them growing some time later, and potted them up. That might be a rival contender for easiest propagation method ever.
The mallows were grown from seed that came free with a magazine. They were looking very good about two months ago, and are now looking desperately pot bound in their nine centimetre pots, so I'll see if they recover once they're in the soil, or if they have gone past the point of no return. The variety is 'Mystic Merlin', and they should be capable of growing a metre tall, if they are not permanently stunted by their check. The Kalimeris incisa were grown from seed that I bought, and are still looking pretty good, but have just hit the roof of the cold frame so that they are starting to kink and are only in circular nine centimetre pots so need planting out or potting on fairly soon.
The red hot pokers are seedlings I salvaged when I was weeding down by the gate. The parent plants were grown from seed labelled Kniphofia rooperi, but since red hot pokers will hybridize at the drop of a hat I probably shouldn't claim that name for their offspring. They make large, vigorous plants with fat red and yellow pokers, and I am fond of them. I already have some growing in the meadow, but am happy to fill the gaps with a few more. The Crocosmia are seedlings of 'Lucifer', grown from seed I harvested from the plants in the back garden.
The great question is whether any of them will manage to survive. I've come across rabbits in the meadow in the middle of the morning, when going up to the bees. I don't know whether they're living inside the rabbit wire, or are getting through it, over it or under it from the wood, and while I hope to eradicate them, it certainly won't be by the end of next week, or even next year. The competition from the hedge roots will be ferocious, and I won't manage more than sporadic watering in a wild part of the garden so far from the tap. I'll get a load of mushroom compost so that they can have a mulch to start them off, and spray them with Grazers, and I might even put up some wire netting as a temporary barrier against the rabbits, as I've got lots in the shed, but in the long run they're on their own. Rabbits don't seem to touch Crocosmia or Kniphofia, but if they like eating Malva and Kalimeris then they probably will.
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