Digging Holes and Adopting Roses

I haven’t been able to give the garden as much time as I like during Ramadan, barely managing to water it and stop everything from dying. Now that I am off work for a few days, I wanted to clean up and tend to some of the plants that weren’t doing as well.

A few of the plants that were withering in the pots, so I planted them into the bed. My shoulder has been very sore the last few days and the ground was hard, so I asked my other half to dig me some holes. He’s so cheesy, he told me if Farhad could dig a tunnel for Shirin through the mountain (Persian love story) he could dig me a hole in the garden :) 

I found some new roses on clearance at Tesco and adopted them. This cream one had big generous blooms, and a light scent, something I find rare these days in roses.

I couldn’t walk past this stunning colour without stopping to enjoy and getting told off by my oldest for wasting time and getting in people’s way. Now it’s in my garden and I can stare at it some more. Hopefully the colour won’t fade or change too much, which is what seems to happen to roses in my garden.

I bought this jasmine last year and was worried it would die over winter, but it has survived and in he last few weeks started to thrive mash’Allah. I’m hoping to train it up the fence. It’s also finally starting to flower. Last night I went into the garden for a bit and could smell it’s faint scent on the air.

These strawberry plants are from last year too, there are two or three small plants and one of them has a few blossoms.

I think this clematis is from about two years ago and I think we may have had a flower last year. It seemed to have taken only tenuously last year and I was worried it might die, it looked so fragile. This year it has grown leaps and bounds and started to grow up the wall. I am hoping to train it up the back fence. I’m really excited to see quit a lot of flower buds, so can’t wait to see what the flower looks like.

From this week, I’ll be keeping a closer eye on my seedlings insh’Allah. My first attempt to re-pot the bigger sunflower seedlings to give them more space seems to have killed them, so I'm leaving alone mostly for now.  The seeds we threw into the flower bed also seem to have taken hold and I am just waiting to see what they grow into.

I have found that there are a couple of apps that help you to identify seedlings. I downloaded PlantSnap, PictureThis and Plantyx for free and so far, have tried PlantSnap to successfully identify that one of the group of seedlings that have done really well are nasturtium plants.  So will be trying to identify the rest and label some of them insh’Allah.

Have you been growing anything at the moment? What is doing well in your garden or growing space?