Plant it…

It’s that time of year…

Gardening!

I am a self-confessed antithesis of a green fingered person (what is the opposite of green-fingered? Black-fingered? I kill houseplants-they don’t whinge at me loudly or persistently, so they don’t get fed or watered-those are the rules in our house…)
Normally, my mum or mother-in-law are roped in to come and do it all while I hide indoors baking help but this year, they didn’t. Booooooo.
So it was down to us to try and make the garden look vaguely nice.

Now I know I have debated before where cut flowers fit into My Make Do and Mend Year, and The Rules, and not really arrived at any firm conclusions, and I suppose if we were being really hardcore, and forward-planning, then technically we should have grown all our bedding plants ourselves from seeds harvested from the plants from the previous year. But we aren’t really known for our forward-planning, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to Do It All, so we hadn’t. Sorry.
So we went and bought some bedding plants. In our defence, we went to a very sweet, independantly owned, local nursery (that also has a cattery attached, and they line their hanging baskets with cat fur-slightly creepy..) and therefore we were supporting a local business and boosting the local economy, etc. etc. And technically, plants and flowers are ‘consumable’, like food and toiletries…

We came back armed with all the plants we thought looked pretty, having given very little thought to how many pots/hanging baskets we had, and what plants work best where. You live and learn…

First up were our 2 hanging baskets. We knew we needed liner things as we had: a) seen my mum use them before; and b) remarked on the creepy cat hair liners at the nursery, so we scratched our heads as to what we could use. I suggested felt/fleece as I thought we had some from the Scrapstore kicking around, but we didn’t, and then hubby remembered that he had a load of old underlay in his mum’s garage (when I questioned him as to why, he mumbled something about carpeting the garage, or it’s walls-should I be concerned…?) and he whizzed of to his mum’s to get some. It was pretty much perfect, except it wasn’t nicely pre-cut in the shape of the hanging basket like the nice expensive ready made liners, but we coped.

2 hanging baskets down, and we turned our attention to the rest of the plants and some Make Do and Mend containers….

Sweet Williams (looking a bit sorry for themselves having been in our possession for a couple of weeks and been sat neglected and un-watered) in an old pair of BigSmall’s wellies:

He wore through the toes on braking on his balance bike-hubby tried to mend them with Mastick, but it didn’t really work

My lovely old boots that I still love very much and have not been able to find decent replacements for (the zip had gone on one, and both had been patched up and repaired numerous times).

I cut the tops off and have plans to use the leather for ‘something’ as yet undetermined-any ideas?
Hubby had to use his drill to make some holes in the bottom for water drainage…

I hesitate to say this, but I think I may actually be a convert to gardening. I never want to go out and do any, but once I get started, I kind of enjoy it. And the Smalls ran around like loopy things, and BigSmall spent 20 minutes watching this

and then was VERY chuffed when he was allowed to use Daddy’s hammer to smash up an old broken pot to make bits to go in the bottom of the boots/pots. In fact, when questioned later about whether he’d had a good day, hammering up old pots was his highlight…..

What’s the strangest thing you have ever used as a planter in your garden..?!