"Old Green House"? "Concrete & Brick Structure"?


In the middle of the photo you can see a metal post I banged in this evening to mark where "structure" stops and earth begins. The brick path running across the bed I also put in, to mark where the Midwest bed starts.

So the area around what will be the new shed, I decided to use as a kind of informal seed bed. That's the ground between the metal post and the brick path, and running down to the left beneath the ash tree. All seeds hanging around the fridge, homeless, went in there today.

There were about 400 hawthorns. They'd had 2 months in the fridge, and month on the windowsill, no shows, so back to the fridge; (where, by the way, the carrier bag I'd put them in with their compost stuck to the back of the fridge, tore when I tried to get it out, spilling compost all over the bloody fridge and causing me 20 mins work to empty the fridge and clean it all up). Also the alder which has been on the windowsill for a month or more, and produced only 3 plants, (there they are near the foreground of the photo, pricked out into pots now).

And there was a packet of free wildflower seeds I got from Beefayre, and a packet of Common Dog Violets we bought last summer at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens after seeing Fraxi, Queen of the Forest, (in which a dog violet caterpillar gave some light relief). Also spanish bluebell seeds held in a 120 film container since 2012, from the garden in Saltcoats. Finally, an absurd amount of poppy seed harvested from this part of the allotment last autumn.

To sum up, trees which may or may not show up now or next spring, and a load of other stuff which can take care of itself and should self-seed.

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