Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The rose project

One of our wedding presents was some named rose seeds so with some trepidation we followed the instructions and planted them, and crossed our fingers some would come up. We had six seeds and the instructions were to plant them in a tray of vermiculite and keep moist and between 20 and 23°C (how do you manage to keep the temperature that exact during a British summer?!).

Vermiculite looks worryingly like cat litter! Nothing much happened indoors so we decided to give up on the temperature thing and moved it outside, keeping our fingers crossed again that no local cats would decide to investigate the new toilet facilities. Lo and behold, a seedling emerged within a few days!

Closely followed by four more!


I will post more pictures soon once the seedlings are a bit bigger. We also constructed this over the weekend. A cold frame for my cuttings to go in and to help things acclimatize to outside temperatures - bought in the Lakeland sale.

And some of the free bulbs I got have been flowering. This gladioli is one of my favourites:

 Oh, and I came home from work and discovered the OH had bought me some SHEEP socks. Isn't he sweet?!

2 comments:

Victoria T said...

Oooh, flowers! The little seedling is cute! I can't wait to see them when they bloom.

Ohh and the gladiolus is very pretty! I love that color.

And yes, Neil is VERY sweet for buying you VERY cute sheep socks!

I would really love to put out some potted plants, but now is not the time--they wouldn't last but a few months anyway... maybe next spring!

Mary Anne said...

It's so cool that your rose seeds have sprouted. I'm looking forward to watching them grow.

A cold frame is a most excellent way to keep your cuttings happy. The glads are a beautiful flower and one of my favourites too.

Sheep socks, woohoo!