Gomphrena Atomic Purple

Gomphrena Atomic Purple - Mr Fothergills - 50 Seeds - £2.95 - Item Code 39207 

Plant Class  Half-hardy annual

Height 600mm (2 feet)

Spread 300mm (1 foot)

Charming rounded flower heads provide a contrast to other flowers in the garden. Drought resistant and great for fresh or dried cut flowers.

Half-hardy plants cannot withstand winter wet and cold and will be killed by the frosts. However, you don't need to wait until the warmer weather to get going – sow your seeds or grow your seedlings in a light, frost-free place, protecting them under cover until the frosts are over.

Growing Instructions

Sow Indoors February -April, 5mm (1/4") deep in trays of compost. Keep moist and warm at approx. 15-20C (60-68F). Transplant seedling 50mm (2") apart to other trays when large enough to handle. Grow on in cooler, but not cold conditions. Gradually accustom young plants to outside conditions (avoid frosts) before planting out 250mm (10") apart, when frosts are over. 

Flowering /Harvesting June- September.  

For some reason I ended up with three packs of theses seeds in my bulk order from Mr Fothergills. I had not requested them, but hay you never look a gifted pack of seeds or three in the mouth even if they are flowers and not vegetables.  

Woodchips Arrive

Finally one of the plot holders "Michelle" has found a reliable source for Woodchips for our allotment she kindly phoned me and told me it had arrived during the week and it look like some of the plot holders have already attacked the pile. The high winds over the last week had moved a few things around the plot and these items were recovered and reinstated where they should be.  

I cleared the wheelie bins and other debris from the back and side of the shed and applied a generous thickness of woodchips before putting the wheelie bins and blue water pipe hoops back. 

I was hoping for some Daffodils to take home for the wife but from the looks of things a large proportion of these have come up blind for some reason?. I'm going to have to find out why and I'm also going to decide of I'm going to leave them in this bed and just mulch over the weed membrane or move the daffs between now and next year. What would you do?

   

The paths adjacent to beds 12 & 13 have now both had weed membrane and a layer of woodchips applied. The timber for the new beds have been stacked to indicate the size of the beds. I will ultimately pull back the weed membrane and dig and weed these beds and the 600mm path behind indicated by the paving slab, before installing the timber. 

The paving slabs have been moved so that I can work on installing the path from the shed to the path that can be seen on plot 1A. At the moment the ground goes up and down quite a lot and the plan is to flatten it out and lay a bed of woodchips for the slabs to bed onto.

Then I realised that the slabs for the path were still covered in Hawthorne and that I needed to attack the Hawthorne as it need to be burnt by the end of March. We had sunshine and halestones on three occasions during the morning and at 1pm it was time to make my way home via the supermarket to get some shopping for lunch. 

Note to self, don't ever go supermarket shopping on a Sunday again!   

Hawthorne Attack

When I got up to go to the allotment this morning it was cold I was breathing out smoke, I wiped down the dew off the windows except the front windscreen which as covered in ice. So I warmed the car up and put the heater on and waited for the warmth to do its work and then made my way to the allotment getting there just before 8am.

Frost covered the timber joists that I painted on my last visit, and so it was that I decided to attack the Hawthorne bush / tree and cut off as much as I could rather than paint over frost covered timber. My future son-in-law arrived with a van load of leafs from his garden and we filled up the leaf boxes to the top, we topped up two Daleks and filled another Dalek that contains only leaf's up to the very top.

We had a coffee then he departed and I attacked the Hawthorne 

The top of the tree is lying over the slabs and I gradually started working my way into it filling up a couple of square flower buckets with cuttings. Rotting timber was cut to the flower bucket height and was left in the sun to dry out. 

Cuttings and timber previously stored was used to fill the two incinerators and was set alight. I love the incinerators when they suck air in through the bottom and expel the heat and like this morning flames through the chimney burning nearly clean with very little smoke. 

Most of the problems we have with neighbours occurs when plot holders burn wet weeds and material that produces a load of smoke without letting it dry out first. I only have the rest of March to have fires, so that's only four weekends to cut up the trees and old rotten timber I inherited when I got the plot and burn it all 

   

Bed 13 the daffodil & Tulip bed is doing really well and it looks like I will have quite a few flowers to take home to the wife. 

More Painting

More painting of timber Joist today and I'm nearly at the end of my second tin or Ronseal One Coat Fence Paint and yes it's still rubbish and needs more like three coats to cover than the one stated on the tin, but will have to do

 Bed 13 that is full of Daffodils and Tulips is on the move 

They are coming up 

The tulips on the table are on their way up, but the fox has dug up one of the planters on the floor

The timber that was stacked on the cast iron table in the background was moved to a rack behind the shed and some of the dirty stuff leaned against the wall so the rain can wash it off before I stack it horizontally. 

Tulips & Fire

I was fairly pissed off that I would not be able to get on with painting the timber joist that are to be used as bed edging when I awoke at 7am to rain.

The forecast was for it to rain all morning until about 11am, however no one had told the weather that the forecast had changed and come 8:00am it started to get a bit brighter and the rain stopped.

So a mad dash to a very cold and damp plot to see what could be done. The mass of Tulips have been sitting in shed since I bought them to go into the transition beds from Plot 1A to Plot 1 which unfortunately are still not ready yet 

I filled all but three rows of bed 13 with Daffs a couple of weeks ago, this morning those 3 rows were planted with Tulips 

The long and short terracotta coloured plastic pots have been sown with Tulips  

I really could not have left the tulips in the shed anymore, I found half a dozen large black pots and have probably put too many tulips in together but it will have to do for this year.  

Dam I didn't notice the last pot I used was smaller than the others

As I was running out of compost and needed to get to the sack near the potting bed that was covered in bamboo canes, I decided to screw the two brackets I made from the tops of flower buckets to the side of the shed so that I can stack all the 1.2m canes neatly out of the way.  
   

I managed to greatly reduce the size of the Hawthorne in the middle and have reduced the one nearest to the shed to a stump. The middle one and the one at the end of the plot need to be dealt with and burnt before the end of March when we are no longer allowed to have fires.   

I set the contents two incinerators alight and because the material was dry in them, they both burnt with very little smoke, so not a massive change to the look of the allotment, but some progress despite the weather and everything being wet.

As it hit 1pm the rain started all over again, so a quick tidy and home for Sunday lunch.

Daffodil's finally get planted

I purchased a load of Daffodil and Tulip Bulbs to go into new beds along the interface between Plot 1A and Plot 1, but I haven't been able to get the beds in and now being January and the bulbs have started to sprout I had no alternative but to find somewhere to put them. 

So I cleared bed 13 and placed a 105 hole planting sheet over and have planted 12 rows or 84 bulbs in the bed. 

Marigolds & Membrane

Last night I sowed 49 marigolds directly into the second Agralan Compact Plug Plant Trainer and they are in the Space Saver Geen house. With there being no Spring and a Jump straight to summer (for this week at least) the Carrots in the external Grow station have also now been moved to the Space Saver. I cut 5 number 3m lengths of Weed Membrane and marked one up in third strips to used for paths and managed to get everything away before it got dark

This mornings one gardening thing before work was to cut the weed membrane with the soldering iron so that I have some to hand when I start digging and weeding the new plot hopefully on Sunday. I managed 3 x 0.666m wide x 3m long strips, 2 x 1.2m wide x 3m strips and 2 x 0.8m wide strips. The sun takes time to come around the side of the house in the morning and I managed to get three of the five cut rolls trimmed before the direct sunlight hit the patio, and I needed to start work. 

Flowers On The Plot

When I first got my allotment my thoughts were only of food and not flowers, but gradually I have started to appreciate not only flowers visually but how they support and attract pollinators especially Bees, and how they can encourage certain predators or repel troublesome insects.  

We are quite lucky that we have a bee keeper on our plot, and the bees enjoy my ivy bush/ tree that grows above and behind my shed and the flowers on the comfrey. They spend time in my runner beans and other beds pollinating on their way to and from these two nectar resources which are at the furthest end of my plot from where their hives are located at the back of the drop off and pick up area.

Poached egg plants, (Limnanthes douglassi) are very easy to establish, they are supposed to be self-seeding, but I end up growing a new batch each year, and I plant these in the Runner Bean bed.  

The best thing about poached egg plants is they flower for such a long season and they attract hoverflies and ladybirds which love to feed on blackfly and aphids. So successful are they in quelling these invasive little insects which are ‘farmed’ and ‘milked’ by ants, that over the last few years since discovering them that  I have not had to wash off the aphids with soapy water, which always seemed to have a detrimental effect on the runner beans and since using the Poached Egg Plants I've had wonderful crops.

English marigold (calendula) is superb for hoverflies, which will eat aphids but I have not tried them on the allotment as I only normally see French Marigolds in the seed sales.  

French marigolds are the real smelly ones and can be used to deter whitefly. Mexican marigold does too, but it grows over 5 foot tall, and I don't think I will be growing any of that variety on the plot.

Wild Flowers for Bees In previous years I have received free packets of specially selected mix of wild flowers that will not only look beautiful, but will also attract bees, butterflies and other pollinators to my Allotment. There are enough seed in the pack to cover half a square metre so that's 0.5m x 1.0m.

I use flower buckets and place them at the end of each of the paths between my beds on the allotment. Not forgetting to collect seed heads in September for re sowing the following year.

Daffodils & Blue Bells - I purchased a shed load of Daffs and relocated a quantity of Bluebells from the back garden to the Comfrey bed on plot 1A some years ago.

It's nice to see the early growth, however in 2016 & 2017 they started to show a little early in December !. Somehow it makes me happy to see early signs of Spring in the midst of Winter, and they welcome me to the plot and make me smile.