Roses

Our garden has many different types of roses - climbers, ramblers, bushes, miniature and roses round the door. Some have been blooming for a few weeks and others are just getting going now. They are lovely - but I'm not much good at looking after them. They seem to get a lot of black spot - this year especially perhaps because it's been so wet. The previous owners who designed and built our lovely garden planted roses at the base of all the big trees so we have roses in the magnolia, the silver birch, the maple, Korean fir.

Here are some photos of roses around our garden:

I love this one that looks like it's been painted - but it has lots of prickles!

Bunches of little pink & white flowers

Climbing roses in the silver birch

Big floppy pink roses with lovely perfume

The small pinky-white roses round the front door are looking rather sad this year I usually have to fight the greenfly in the spring and caterpillars later in the year. But this year the leaves are brown and not many flowers at all so I haven't taken a photo. This what they are supposed to look like.

Slug update

The record rain during June has brought out the slugs and snails in force and I need not have worried about the shortage of slugs in the early spring. We've seen a few adult frogs too.
Slugs are everywhere, including I suspect around my French Beans, and in the conservatory and kitchen. They can squeeze through tiny spaces and nowhere is safe.  There's all sizes and colours including the leopard slug which apparently only eats dead vegetation (like wood lice) and so are really useful in the compost heap and generally tidying up.

Here's an entertaining video about their sex life from the BBC Springwatch team:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Gastropoda#p00f0tw1

Busy weekend with redcurrants and tree cutting

We had to take advantage of the few dry spells but managed to get a couple of big jobs done - netting the redcurrants and preparing space for the potted fruit trees.

Last year's Redcurrants - the ones' the birds didn't get!

I hate putting nets over the redcurrants because it does seem a bit mean that we don't share with  the blackbirds and pigeons - but the problem is that left alone the birds don't leave enough for us humans! The pigeons land on top of the bushes, attacking from the top and breaking the branches to get to the fruit. The blackbirds come from below and take the ripe fruit on the lower branches. They are pretty persistent and I have often been picking on on side of a bush and a blackbird on the other side. They get quite annoyed and make their scolding noise if you try and chase them away. Anyway this year we decided to put nets over the six redcurrant bushes. The nets are old and needed some repairs so we'll see how enterprising our feathered friends are in getting to the lovely berries.
The other big job we did - or at least got started with - was to clear space for the new fruit trees we bought last year and which are still in pots. We cut down a malus tree that has rather insignificant flowers for just a week in the spring. It's been trained rather badly into an umbrella shape with the result the grass below is dead. The other area for planting is where a couple of shrubs died in the deep freeze winter before last. We pulled out the stumps and dug over the ground pulling up loads of ground elder to burn.
Next job is to get rid of the tree trunk and dig in lots of compost. We'll use the trunk and larger branches for firewood and have a big bonfire with the rest (as soon as it stops raining!)