Thursdays favourite plant

Hooray its back.

Is it Thursday today? this weeks been a bit of a blur!

Anyway may I present.....

Iris reticulata



My most favourite of the early spring bulbs. Easy as pie to grow just pop the bulbs in twice as deep as their size in the autumn, wherever you'd like a splash of gorgeous colour. I always put a few in small terracotta pots too. They look lovely in window boxes as well.
The colour of these little sweeties is lovely, there are many different varieties with different depths of blue, including a pale washed out blue and mustardy yellow, which frankly I'm not found of (I think you need bright colours after a long dull winter) and a gorgeous purple one whose cultivar name is I think 'Pauline' (but don't quote me on that. If you have heavy clay soils add a handful of grit to the hole before placing the bulb in to give it a bit of drainage (good idea for any bulbs).

In other news I've said goodbye to another cockerel today. I saw a wanted ad in the local feed store for a Maran cockerel, rang it up and a lovely chap from further up the valley came and collected him for his flock of maran hens this morning. And he paid me for him. So that leaves his slightly smaller brother (who I may keep to set up a breeding trio with, not sure yet) Boris and Ivan (the two chaps in my sidebar) and fancy looking but bad tempered bantam. That will leave me with Sawyer my gorgeous gentlemanly Welsummer, Big gentle ben the light sussex and holly my partridge silkie. There is also the two silkie babies, snuffkin and little my, I tried dowsing them with my wedding ring and a bit of garden twine last night and got a different result for each, but time will tell.

Right Sidneys appeared in the middle of the field wanting some dinner and he doesn't like to be kept waiting.

jess x