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Category: Garden Highlights | Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2011 8:09 pm

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1. Strawberry red.
I picked the first strawberry yesterday, carefully cut it in half, and shared it with my wife. It was delicious! And there will be many more to follow over the next few weeks!

2. Cherry red.
It's also time to pick the cherries. The tree is far too big to cover all of it, but I put some fleece over some of the lower branches, held in place with clothes pegs.


Fleeced cherries ( photo / image / picture from OrangeKing's Garden )

It looks ugly, but it's only for a few weeks, and without the fleece the birds take ALL of the cherries, while with only those few branches covered in fleece I picked about ten pounds of cherries last year. Dark red, juicy and delicious!

3. Seeing red.
It's the end of spring, and time to sow biennials again. This year I'm sowing Hesperis matronalis, or Sweet Rocket, which has lavender and white flowers, and Wallflower 'Ivory White'. The wallflowers are intended for the front border which has only white and blue flowers.

I did exactly the same last year, but was unpleasantly surprised when the seeds sold to me as 'Ivory White' turned out to be dark red!


Ivory red ( photo / image / picture from OrangeKing's Garden )

The picture shows the seed packet propped up amongst the flowers it produced; notice that they have also managed to misspell the Latin name: it should be 'cheiri' not 'cheri'!

I pulled them out of my blue and white border, and complained to the seed company (I won't name them here to avoid any legal complications) who were apologetic, but were unable to offer any explanation of how they had managed to get seed for red plants into a packet clearly marked as white.

Needless to say, this year's seed came from a different company, and I won't be going back to the incompetent ones in a hurry!

This has never happened to me before. I've been growing annuals and biennials for decades, and never had the wrong plant or colour appearing. Has anyone else out there had this sort of problem?



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Frank wrote on Sun Jun 05, 2011 3:49 am:

Did you get any reimbursement from the seed company? Seems aggravating when your carefully planned border is infiltrated by red impostors :)

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OrangeKing wrote on Sun Jun 05, 2011 5:02 pm:

They did say 'is there anything we can send you as compensation', but I couldn't think of anything (and still can't) that would compensate for six months nurturing plants that in the end I didn't want, so I declined. I would have been happy with an explanation, but they've failed to supply even that!

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