Sunday, March 07, 2010

Plants and other random bits and pieces

The week has rushed by, as ever. We have our friend Alison staying for a 'working holiday': sorting out accounts at the office, and also spending time sitting in the sun and reading. Richard's had quite a nasty cold and cough, but has continued working many hours including spending most of the weekend, as usual, painting and doing other work on King Malu. The weather has been fine, and mostly sunny although not particularly warm.

A couple of months ago I realised that some of the planters on our front porch were looking a bit bare. Well, actually they were full of weeds, and one of them had rather a lot of tiny geranium seedlings which had evidently planted themselves, aided by the rain. I'm really not much of a gardener. I'm more than happy not to have to do any gardening any more; it used to be quite a hassle at our old house and I don't miss that at all. But I do like to see a few pots at the front of the house.

So we went to the local place, and bought a few petunias and antirrhinums, both of which do well in Cyprus.


Then I spent half an hour getting rid of weeds, transplanting geraniums into other pots. I'm not at all sure what we'll do with these little ones:


- but these ones are doing quite nicely on top of the posts by the gate.


I haven't even needed to do any watering so far - other than one day when I suddenly realised we'd had a warm and dry spell for nearly a week - but no doubt I will have to get back into the habit of regular watering when the weather starts to warm up.

Oh, and our Christmas poinsettia, as usual, is still thriving and looking colourful on the windowsill by our front door:

4 comments:

Gill - That British Woman said...

I am going to pull up my geranium plants from the basement this next week, to get them ready to plant out at the end of May....as that is when the last chance of frost has gone here in Southern Ontario.

Gill in Canada, a former Cumbrian

Carole said...

Hi

My name is Carole and I am the Community Manager at Expat Focus.
I would be grateful if you would contact me carole@expatfocus.com

I apologise for contacting you through the comments box, but I was unable to find your email address.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards
Carole

Anonymous said...

Hi. What is the secret to your poinsettia's longevity?

Sue said...

The poinsettia 'secret' seems to be that we've found a spot that happens to work well! It gets some sunshine, but not a huge amount. I water it sporadically when I remember, but basically neglect it. It worked the first year we had one at Christmas - I was surprised that it survived beyond January - and each year since then we've put one in the same spot, with the same result. By Autumn they get leggy and woody, and we haven't yet succeeded in getting one to survive more than a year, but then by December there are lots of new ones available in the shops.