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Thursday 24 July 2014

DEAD HEADING AND WATERING

The sun is good and hot today with not much of a breeze.  In fact we've had a good few sunny days lately with the promise of more to come.  Although it rained a few days ago, water is now evaporating from my garden like crazy and I'm trying to keep the pots from drying out.  The dahlias, Fascination, collapsed with the heat although I only watered them yesterday evening, and so I have rewatered, and fed them, and supported them with cane and string.  Mid afternoon I did some dead-heading of the dahlias and everything else that needed it.  I chopped down the lovely Senecio Polyodon just above ground level.  It was still full of bloom but was also full of tiny dead heads making fluffy seeds.  It was all getting out of hand and straggly, it looked a mess, and really it was casting too much shade on other plants.  Roses, New Dawn and Wild Eve, have also required dead-heading and I've taken the opportunity to prune back the growth a little as they were overhanging the lawn and getting problematic.  I don't like to tie back New Dawn, a cross between a climber/ramber, and Wild Eve which can be grown as shrub or climber, because they look so good growing free with the Jasminum officinale that grows next to the garden shed, and Lonicera periclymenum 'Scentsation', winding through them. 






New Dawn rose flower in need of dead-heading






Busy bees love the openness of the Fascination dahlia

I can see I've made a few planting errors in my garden and there are plants that should grow relatively tall, planted toward the back of the border, but they have been dominated by plants like the lovely Malvas which have thrown shadow on those plants and inhibited them from growing.  I knew there would be casualties and mistakes when I was planting, so I'm not really disappointed.