Forget April’s showers - where are May’s flowers?

by Tamsin Hemingray in At home on 28.04.08

Am I the only novice flower gardener who got caught out by April’s cold snap and forgot to plant anything? I should be honest with you. When it comes to allotments, I’m definitely of the Jenny-Come-Lately, fairweather variety of gardener. In fact, I don’t even have an allotment of my own. (One of the negative aspects of the recent increase in allotment use is the enormously long waiting list you’re likely to encounter at your local council’s allotment office. In Scotland, there are waits of up to 10 years, apparently, and turf wars are breaking out left right and centre.)

My other half and I share a plot with our pals, who took pity on us when we were told we’d be waiting five years before we could get a spot in our local allotments.

When our pals made the magnanimous offer to share, we were pretty chuffed. I have very distinct memories of at least four or five occasions in my childhood when my dad forced me to join him at his allotment on a Saturday afternoon. I whined. I moaned. I shuffled and harrumphed. He gave up. (He also got arrested for growing illegal substances not long afterwards, but that’s a completely different story.)

Now, however, I am a grown up. I’m too old and tired to go out clubbing any more. I need a hobby. And all of a sudden, growing stuff seems like a pretty cool way to pass my time. And surely it’s a fun way to spend quality time with my own daughter? You’ll be relieved to hear that I’ve learned from father’s mistakes. My chosen crop will be flowers.

At the beginning of the year I was full of enthusiasm. I bought Sarah Raven’s How To Grow Cut Flowers and read it cover to cover. I took a trip to a garden centre and spent a small fortune on seeds and bulbs. I kept nagging my super-knowledgable, green fingered fellow plotters about when I could start planting out my lillies. “Patience,” I was told. “Wait for the frosts to pass.”

Predictably, I got bored. And now it’s May. And I’ve planted a few lillies, chucked in some sweetpeas, and that’s about it. (And, actually, it wasn’t actually me that planted the lillies and sweetpeas. Ahem.) How did that happen?

So I spent this weekend researching my cut flowers rescue plan. It seems like I haven’t completely missed the boat, though my vision of rows of little seedlings on my kitchen windowsills may have to wait until next year now. The BBC’s gardening site helpfully tells me that I can “finish sowing hardy annual flowers outside in May“. I should also be feeding bulbs with a helpfing handful of fertiliser, apparently.

The Telegraph enlightens me with a bit more detail - wallflowers, cosmos and lupins can all be sown in May. Cue frantic planting from me. It’s the RHS site that really comes up trumps though - their May Gardener’s Calendar page has a wealth of practical information for the lazy flower gardener. So my dahlias, anenomes and californian poppies are now safely sown. Emergency over. The flower garden is back on track. For now…

IMAGE by Flickr user leppre