How to record flowering date?

[charlie]

Just a guess but is it raining where you are to? !! :)

[kGarden]

:) Actually I don't think it was, I this I was skiving between jobs. But ... plenty of rainy-day time taken up dragging Photo Files from original folders to their new location. Some surprises amongst them ... for some "unknown" plants I actually took a photo of the Plant label, 5 years ago, which has now come to light :geek:

Still doing the Spring Planting Out - which I always promise Mrs K will be finished "By the first week of June" so she can get the conservatory back again ... some stuff still too small to plant out :cry: and too many projects on the go; I'm trying to move lots of the work-in-progress projects to "Maintenance" so that they are presentable - topiary yews planted in the lawn are now fat enough that I can cut a nice, circular, edge to the lawn around them, even though the plants themselves have not reached the final circumference I want; that job required laying out line, measuring, leaning-on-my-shovel (if I smoked a pipe no doubt there would be some pipe-stroking involved int he thinking process!) and some cups-of-tea ...







I've also been trying to tame my Lavender hedge. I've never been able to prune it "like the pro's do", so (like most gardeners, I guess?) it has grown more and more each year, until it became straggly. They started life as miniature cheap-as-chips plug plants from van Meuwen of L. angustifolia, probably seed-grown



and the temptation was to plant some stronger-coloured L. Hidcote from a reputable, vegetatively reproduced, source; trouble with that is both cost and a delay of a couple of years for the plants to re-reach a decent size.



Planted Spring 2009



July 2013

Rather than take cuttings (also a 2-3 year project, to get decent sized plants again) I pruned them as normal after flowering in 2015 but also cut back any stem which had anything alive / shooting lower down the stem. This removed a fair amount of material, but not a huge amount.

At the start of May, when they started into growth, there was some sprouting activity lower down the stems, I expect this is normal, but dies out through lack of light begin shaded by the rest of the bush. I cut back anything & everything that had any growth, which let a lot more light in. I repeated that fortnightly, including re-pruning,further back, anything that was now sprouting even further down the stem. I reckon in mid June I could have just cut away "anything else" - which had not sprouted further down, but had been providing the plant with Energy - as there was plenty of new growth, but I was busy with other things and a week later and it is all getting ready to flower, so I've decided to leave it, enjoy the flowers (although in places the hedge looks like the Rats have been at it, of course!) with the intention of cutting away all straggly stems after flowering, to leave just the new growth to harden and mature before winter.



Pruning spoil in May ...



... and more in June