tulips and trellis

I was taken aback to discover another box of last year's tulips in the garage, just as I thought I had finished with tulips.  They were labelled 'Concerto' and after a moment's confusion as to why they weren't in the box with the others I remembered they are a relatively low growing, early, soft cream variety that I had on pots on the terrace (or patio) and meant to reuse in one of the beds in the back garden.  Which means I should have potted them up last November ready for planting out this spring as soon as I can see what else is coming up in that bed.

They appear to be in perfectly good nick, as were the red and orange ones I've been planting in the dahlia bed over the past couple of days, so I had better pot them up and hope they start growing extremely fast so that they'll be ready to go out before everything else in the bed is too far advanced.  This is where the list could have come in handy, if I'd entered Pot tulip 'Concerto' as a separate entry instead of a generic comment on tulips then I'd have known they were there.

It took a bit more than ten minutes to sort out the small patch of flower bed at the end of the dahlia bed by the greenhouse, behind my laboriously home made trellis.  The trellis consists of two uprights, scrounged from the plant centre when they demolished a pergola, and no more than five horizontal battens, if that many, and it took me absolutely hours to make, not being a great carpenter.  A red rambling rose and an amber honeysuckle had just got going on it nicely when the uprights rotted through at the base, and the Systems Administrator had to come to my aid with a power saw and some Met Posts.

After the trellis was mended everything went on happily for another couple of years, until the honeysuckle mysteriously died back.  I trimmed out all the dead stems last autumn, so today I mulched the bast with mushroom compost and fed it with fish, blood and bone, and will see if it sprouts again or has not merely died back but died absolutely.  I can't see why it should die when the rose is doing perfectly well and made several new shoots last year, but light soil at the top of a retaining wall is not what one would recommend for honeysuckle, so perhaps it found conditions too mere.  Weeding the minuscule area took longer than I was anticipating because some irritating bits of ivy had seeded into the corners and were reluctant to be rooted out.

After last night's rain the back garden is so sodden that the lawn squelches audibly when you walk across it, so I left the large pile of branches dragged out of the wood over the New Year where they were on the grass for another day and confined my activities to the front garden, working my way further up the long bed with mushroom compost, fish blood and bone and Strulch.  Our Ginger came to see what I was doing, but did not like the look of the manure, and howled at me from the drive before stomping off.

Addendum  We are still finding Christmas tree needles everywhere.  There was a puddle of them by the sink, and I keep having to pick odd ones out of my socks.