Green fingers…

I think that my fingers are reasonably green. It runs in the blood and I was born in a time where everybody gardened and grew their own veg. Only the very rich had gardeners and getting some man in just to cut your hedge was unheard of. You did it yourself and without the benefit of hedge trimmers – snip, snip, snip.

Still, green fingers are all well and good but not everything ‘gardening’ works out quite as expected. For instance: ­­­­no matter how closely I follow the instructions on the back of the seed packet sometimes things don’t grow as I might have expected them to - and in some cases not at all.

I once bought a packet of Himalayan blue poppy seeds. I knew that they would be a challenge when I read that the seeds should be soaked and rolled in a wet paper towel then placed in the fridge for a few days before sowing onto the surface of individual pots of gritty compost. I followed the instructions to the letter, placing my pots in a cold frame to germinate, not at all perturbed by the statement that the seeds could take anything from between two weeks and three months to germinate.

I waited two weeks, then four, then six. After three months there was still no sign of a plant, after six months the pots still resembled miniature deserts. At about 10 months I gave up and threw the contents of my pots, seeds and all, into the bin.

Maybe that was a mistake, after all you never can tell. Last year I bought a chocolate cosmos. It grew for a while then seemed to falter before flowering so I left it in a quiet corner of the yard and forgot all about it. This year I was surprised to see fresh growth in the pot, so planted it into a bigger one where it has thrived, getting bigger and stronger each day. I now have my first chocolate bloom and there seem to be plenty still to come.

This year’s disaster are my scabiosa – pincushion flowers as my Nan used to call them. Now these are meant to be easy to grow from seed so I planted up a couple of trays with two varieties including the giants which cost me a fortune. In all I sowed four packets of scabiosa seed and I have only three plants, Still, three is better than none and in my defence it was a pretty lousy start to the year in weather terms.

So my cosmos came back and my pincushions, though limited, has at least appeared. Maybe it’s time to try the blue poppy again just to see how green my fingers are these days.

Now where did I put that green paint?.