July garden: bringing home too many plants

Like many gardeners, visits to a local nursery can result in all sorts of plants coming home with you and then, the grand dilemma of what to do with them...

A few weeks ago, a local nursery owner passed away and there was a closing down sale, which I missed but the leftovers were donated to the local charity shop and I was told about it then. So I got all of these, for the equivalent of around 10 HBD.

Here we have, clockwise from the left: Pennyroyal, an artichoke, an Aeonium, kale and red spinach seedlings, an unknown mesemb groundcover in the little square pot, a dormant kniphofia, aka Red hot poker, Sanseveria patens, Aloe "sakura" and some kind of Oxalis

These 2 are native fruits: Natal plums, I got a third one a week later.

The fun part was getting all of these plants home on the scooter but I managed it: some went in my bag, some in a box on the back seat, some in a box between my feet and some in the luggage compartment under the seat.

Then it was time to figure out where to put them - the kale and spinach looked bad due to the neglect caused when the nursery was undergoing liquidation but are looking happier in the vegetable patch. The succulents went either into pots or the garden, the oxalis went in to this obvious choice of a pot, haha

The red hot poker badly needed to go into something bigger: even though it's dormant, the bag was full of roots and direct exposure to the cold weather in that thin plastic bag is not good for them. Although it's dormant, the soil and plastic pot protects the roots from temperature extremes. It will go into the garden at a later stage

The little native fruits looked like hell because they have spent way too long in that nursery, baking the roots in a sunny and exposed position until they look almost like bonsais but they are so tough, they will bounce back in no time. I cut all the dead bits, potted them up although I still need a pot for the third plant that I got a few days ago. Ill move some more plants around...

Only the artichoke still needs repotting although that's dormant and the condition isn't too poor as some of the other plants were so I'm not too rushed

I got enthusiastic and decided to repot all the Aeoniums. They are winter growing plants and dislike the heat and summer rainfall so it's best to keep them in pots and move them to a cool spot out of the rain in summer or they start rotting from the roots

This is all of the aeoniums, repotted at last

I like buying old ceramic pots from junk shops and drilling holes in them to grow my succulents in. Like all lazy gardeners, I tend to procrastinate about getting them potted up but I have been motivated this past week. Winter is a good time to get tidying.

@ewkaw and @ludmila.kyriakou why not join us and give an overview of the past month? Take a look here