In the garden - May

After all that lovely rain in April, we were wondering how the garden would respond. Well we needn't have worried. We managed to get our lovely nephew involved in a bit of gardening, here he is helping Lucy pull up some dandelions and doing soe hoeing! As you may have seen with all the ladybird posts recently - we're having great fun checking the willow hedge each day to see which wonderful insects are enjoying the garden.

The chives and strawberrys are especially healthy and giving us a wonderful show in the process. with the abundance of strawberry flowers, it looks like we're in for a good crop this year.

Our half barrel is performing well also, with the ranunculus being generous with its flowers and its ability to root from its stems allowing easy vegetative propogation. I took a few rooted stems of mimulus from my parents pond too, which are coming on well and will hopefully flower later on in the summer.

The raised beds showed another surprised. What I thought was a type of stonecrop turned out to be a yellow ice flower. The flowers open up in the morning and gently close in the evening.

What we bought as a small, but expensive, salvia last year, has now quadrupled into a lovely structure that is happily performing in the sun. I'm hoping to split it when it finishes flowering, but will do some research as to when the ideal time is. (If you know, please write me a comment!). Also below, the snow-in-summer is doing a wonderful job.

In an attempt to get ourselves a bit more privacy, we erected some trellis as shown in a previous post, for some honeysuckle to keep company. We also replaced our wrought iron gate with a solid wooden gate, as people walking up the street could see straigh into and down our garden fro a few hundred metres away! We're hoping to use the old gate for some climbers. We also finally put up the clogs that my parents bought us in the Netherlands. Leon was also present for the drilling of the wall, to which he shouted 'Timmy's breaking Lucy's house'! Thanks, Leon, thanks. Anyway, I hope you all don't think I've broken the house, but that we've created a nice little feature that will look great once the Petunias really start to show.

Well that's the update for this month. In the next month we really need to get down to some weeding and try to keep the willow hedge in check - because as normal, it's doing wonderfully! We're having some problems with the budleja, so we'll have to see if that recovers, but what will definitely give us a good show is the lavatera.

As always, I'd love to sneek a peek at all of your gardens, so feel free to leave a link to your blog in the comments!