I rent. One day – fate and finances willing – I’ll have a home with a patch of land and can really flex my gardening muscles, but at this point I’m getting pretty handy working within the limits of space, soil and scope that renting applies. We’re due to move again in a month, so I’m looking back at what I’ve managed in the last three years; and am rather pleased about it 🙂
Starting out.

I managed to bring a few plants with me from the last (rented) place, although that was limited to what had been able to survive the twin assaults of snails and vine weevils that made such a meal of my Brighton garden. So, a small trough of foxgloves, some potted fushias, an extremely nibbled dwarf honeysuckle, two skimmias (male), and a surprisingly mollusc’d rhubarb. Luckily there is a B&Q fairly close to where we are, and I’m pretty good at resurrecting plants from the clearance section.

Quite nice, but not doing a huge amount for wildlife at the time. Green is good, but we can do better. Fast forward to end of April (and this is London so things are fairly far ahead).

I was growing up tomatoes (various), squash, coleus and some ‘night sky’ petunias. They’re a bit useless where pollinators are concerned (to the point you can watch bees investigate, then give up), but I do love their flowers. The next set of photos are from July, showing a lot more of those plants, and also that I was going strongly with the ‘just shove it in there’ strategy of arranging pots. Still, a considerable improvement:


Following this there was a Housemate Watering Incident, so everything did need a bit more TLC than usual to recover. A summary of growing findings for this year are:
– Hanging baskets are a collossal pain in the bum when you live somewhere hot and windy. Water-retaining crystals don’t cut it if someone forgets to water things for a week.
– Dwarf broad beans are beloved by bees, but limited in yield in pots.
– Vine weevils will utterly wreck containers of strawberries as well as you fushias. Little buggers.
– Patio eggplants are cute, but I am not very good at growing them.
– I have no concept of how many is ‘too many’ tomatoes.
A final shot of the end-summer garden, before I move onto a new post and 2018!
