by Lesley Palmer | Jun 7, 2016 | Customer Trial Panel, Flowers, Fruit, Fuchsia Festival, Gardening Posts, Your Stories
About a month ago I was fortunate enough to meet Kris Collins and Micheal Perry to discuss an idea I have about children’s gardening. Shortly before this I had been speaking to Wendie (Marketing Assistant at T&M) who offered me a Fuchsia FUCHSIABERRY plant by Thompson & Morgan on the premise that I blogged about how I got on. Kindly, Kris had brought not 1 but 3 small plants for me and a gorgeous, decorative pot.
I was so excited to get the home and start my recordings! This is how I’ve got on so far and how I potted them up.
Fuchsia FUCHSIABERRY x 3 & Decorative Pot
In one of the gardens I work in has a very large pine tree which drops a lot of cones. I collect these and use them in the bottom of my plant pots for drainage instead of crocs as they are light weight and they compost! So I filled my pot about a quarter of the way with the cones.
Cones filling Pot & Filled Pot with Compost
It’s recommended that for fuchsias to use a well-drained compost mix like John Innes No.3. Unfortunately I didn’t have any to hand and it’s not very easily sourced in my area (unless you want to pay the jumped up prices of my local garden centre). So I was a little bit naughty and used B&Q multipurpose compost that I always use and because I was going away for the weekend over the first May bank holiday and didn’t want my little ‘berry’s’ to suffer! I filled the pot to within 2 inches of the rim and firmed gentle with my hands.
Teasing out Roots of Fuchsia FUCHSIABERRY & Planted Up Fuchsia FUCHSIABERRY
Here comes the best bit for me. Getting my hands in the compost and wiggling my fingers about to make the holes for the fuchsias. Just look at all those roots!
I gently teased a few out on each plant to aid it’s rooting once in the pot. And this is the final product of combining three sweet, little fuchsias and one gorgeous pot!
Fully Potted Up Fuchsia FUCHSIABERRY & Fully Grown Fuchsia FUCHSIABERRY
If you really want some amazing results then the best thing to feed your Fuchsias with is incredibloom®, on the shopping list of things for the garden for me. For the mean time though, I am using tea from my wormery, which is working wonders all over the garden.
I will keep you updated on how things are going and will post sneak peeks on Twitter too so follow @ThompsonMorgan and me @Lesley_Jane29 to see how they’re coming along.
Smile,
Lesley
I’m a 23 year old female horticulturalist. I studied at Easton College for two years until June 2014 and became self employed providing garden care and design in North Norfolk. I currently care for around 20 gardens and have now achieved a few designs and a small landscaping project.
I am passionate about getting young people, especially primary schools, involved in gardening again. I have a project running to do with children’s gardening, so if you’d like to know more please get in touch! I began because of spending so much time in the garden with my granddad as a child. I was also a member of my primary school’s environment club.
I am a fan of Michael Perry and James Wong and I love finding out about edible flowers and how to live more independently from my own garden.
by Lesley Palmer | Apr 8, 2016 | Flowers, Gardening Posts, Wildlife, Your Stories
I provide garden care in North Norfolk and trained at Easton College, as it states in my bio below. Just because I have my Diploma it doesn’t mean I know it all. I am constantly learning new things and am intrigued by a great deal. College doesn’t teach you about our relationship and need for animals and insects in our gardens and horticulture. But, through my work, I have learned how much we rely on them and how much they rely on us – and how exploitive of us they can be too!
I often stop when I see a bee and watch as it carefully lands on a flower then oh-so delicately extracts the sweet nectar that it beholds. How could we do all that pollinating without them? And how could they live without us planting for them? There’s a big push at the moment for planting wild flowers in gardens and leaving bare patches for the bees to make their homes in. Birds love it too!
Wildflower Meadow
We can spend £100’s on feeders, fat balls, meal worms, baths, tables, bug hotels, insect feeders and nest boxes all in a year. Just so we can see the flutter of a butterfly, chaffinch, blue tit and but most often than not those blooming pigeons!
In one garden I care for, I have a friend. She follows me around like my shadow. Often pushing her way into where I am working to get the good stuff. I am talking about Athena, the very bold female Black Bird (True Thrush/Turdus merula).
Bug Hotel
This week I was digging up ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria) and she walks right up to me sitting on the ground, working away with my hand fork, to find her lunch. She filled her beak many times! Athena was with me for nearly two hours, coming and going, filling her beak (and stomach) and watching the three Robins (Erithacus rubecula) fight over who’s “turf” it was that I was providing dinner on. It’s a wonderful feeling when it happens.
Female Blackbird
Many people with think I’m daft but I always talk to them, bees, birds, butterflies and the odd squirrel that visits when I’m in another garden. After all the birds help to keep those pesky aphids and slugs at bay and the bees do the hard work for us! (Not too sure what the squirrels do?)
I love my job because not only do I help people to enjoy their gardens again, as most are of the age where they are not able to do it themselves, but I am helping nature to help me. It makes me proud of what I do. And I hope that the rest of you gardeners are too, whether amateur or professional!
So smile, you’re doing something that really matters.
Lesley
I’m a 23 year old female horticulturalist. I studied at Easton College for two years until June 2014 and became self employed providing garden care and design in North Norfolk. I currently care for around 20 gardens and have now achieved a few designs and a small landscaping project.
I am passionate about getting young people, especially primary schools, involved in gardening again. I have a project running to do with children’s gardening, so if you’d like to know more please get in touch! I began because of spending so much time in the garden with my granddad as a child. I was also a member of my primary school’s environment club.
I am a fan of Michael Perry and James Wong and I love finding out about edible flowers and how to live more independently from my own garden.
by Lesley Palmer | Mar 14, 2016 | Flowers, Fruit, Gardening Posts, Your Stories
Have you ever really considered what attracts you to gardening or plants in general? Is it the way they look, the colours they produce, you can eat them or they were just the ones that the shop had at the time? For me it’s a bit more sciency (yes I’ve just made a new word).
We all know that you can set a seed, keep it warm and damp and it will grow. That part is no different to how we reproduce. (Well slightly but the theory is the same.) Except plants don’t just reproduce by seed. Some you can break a piece of them off, put it into water on a windowsill and it starts to shoot roots and grow more leaves. Others simply grow another version of themselves out the side of them, which you can then divide.
It simply fascinates me that they can do this. We can’t simply chop off a toe or take some hair and place it into water to grow another one of ourselves. If we could it might have some rather drastic consequences.
Of course we do share some similar qualities to plants in the way we present ourselves to others to be able to continue to stand as a human race. I know that sounds rather strange but we put on make-up, dress in certain ways and spray ourselves silly with perfumes and aftershaves. But plants are very special in how they do this. They get someone else to do the work for them.
Take the bee orchid. How has it evolved to know that it needs to produce a flower that looks like the bee that pollinates it to reproduce? Or the Titan Arum which has a 10 foot tall flower and smells of rotten meat to attract its pollinators? Some plants will only open when they cane ‘hear’ the vibration of the certain insect that can pollinate it. Others make their fruits attractive to birds because they need the stomach acid to soften the seed coating before it can germinate.
Is it possible that maybe plants, although do not have a physical brain like animals, really do think and have managed to manipulate the world around them for their own advantage? This might be a bold statement but really, plants are far superior to the animal kingdom. After all they have been here thousands of years before us so they should have a good head start. I just can’t get enough of them.
Until next time Lesley
I’m a 23 year old female horticulturalist. I studied at Easton College for two years until June 2014 and became self employed providing garden care and design in North Norfolk. I currently care for around 20 gardens and have now achieved a few designs and a small landscaping project.
I am passionate about getting young people, especially primary schools, involved in gardening again. I have a project running to do with children’s gardening, so if you’d like to know more please get in touch! I began because of spending so much time in the garden with my granddad as a child. I was also a member of my primary school’s environment club.
I am a fan of Michael Perry and James Wong and I love finding out about edible flowers and how to live more independently from my own garden.
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