watering

I finished watering the railway garden and the gravel outside the blue hut this morning.  Originally the forecast was for rain this afternoon, but I didn't take that too seriously, assuming that it wouldn't be enough to do my recent plantings any good, if it happened at all.  In the event it didn't rain.

I watered every one of the rooted cuttings and bargain lavenders in the embryonic Nicole de Vesian rip-off by the blue hut, running the hose to the count of thirty per plant.  A count of thirty comes to a bit less than half a Haws watering can's worth of water, and is based on nothing except experience.  I prefer aiming the water at each plant in turn rather than spraying it vaguely over the entire area, because then I have some idea how much I've applied and can tell when I've finished. Otherwise after ten minutes I'd be tempted to feel I'd done enough, when under the gravel it had barely penetrated the surface.  The Malus 'Red Sentinel' that's not really got going yet got a count of one hundred, and the other that's frankly struggling got twice that.

I watered everything planted this year in the beach themed planting outside the blue hut, and a few things that might prefer it damper than that part of the garden is by mid August.  I've picked up a couple of dwarf Ozothamnus, rather sweet little things with tiny greyish leaves, one from Beeches and the other from an alpine mail order supplier, and I thought as I bought them that I was possibly pushing my luck asking them to live somewhere that dry.  They've looked happy enough so far, but giving them the odd summer soaking probably won't come amiss.

Silene schafta is putting on a good display.  It carries a copious display of small flowers in a warm shade of pink, petals opening wide from deep throats.  The leaves are a pleasant middling shade of green, the habit tidy, and the display in previous years lasted for quite a time.  I bought three originally, and was so pleased with the way they performed that the next year I bought a packet of seed, so that I could have more without paying the £3.95 a pot that my former employer was charging.  They might be available cheaper and smaller from an alpine specialist, but the seed germinated readily and the young plants were forgiving when they got left for far too long in their divided tray in the greenhouse, so they are pretty easy to raise at home.  I can altogether recommend them for low growing late summer colour.

After watering the beach garden I worked my way along the railway garden to the point where I stopped yesterday when I was watering from the other end.  Spotting the recent plantings among the self seeded thyme was more difficult, and I am afraid I have missed out some heathers, while I have lost a small Berberis entirely.  I bought three as part of an alpine order and was somewhat taken aback at quite how small they turned out to be, though for the price I wasn't expecting anything as big as you would find among the shrubs in a garden centre for ten or twelve pounds. With the benefit of hindsight I should have potted them on, and grown them under cover for another season then put them out when they were bigger, but instead I planted them with the rest of the order, and have never since been able to find one of them to water it.

The other risk with planting extremely small shrubs into the railway gravel is that they will get trodden on.  But I can't really mark them with sticks, because the railway is the Systems Administrator's project, and when you are trying to create a one sixteenth scale fantasy landscape you don't want random canes and iron spikes sticking up out of it.  I only got involved in the railway garden at all because it had become weedy and I thought the SA needed help, but I don't want to go muscling in on somebody else's game.