More Than Living

What flowers should you plant in your allotment in May?

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

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​04-​​28 10:30:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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