Gardening 2025

Have been enjoying the garden, helped by the [feels extravagant] purchase of a Niwaki hori-hori, which has made weeding slightly less onerous. I'm genuinely pleased with it (though need to have a "no drunk gardening" rule with it.)

Not having loads of success getting things growing this year - I wonder if I've bought shit compost (I definitely bought one bag from a supermarket).

Really enjoyed visiting a nursery in St David's, Wales, where it felt like most things had been grown in-house and were a bit behind what you'd find in many garden centres and all the better for it.

Yeah, I recognise that sense of buying stuff grown in greenhouses and it reacting badly to being left/planted out. I guess that's experience?

I've never wanted anything so instantly as that hori-hori! (I'd not heard of it before.)

I welcome this thread. I have recently acquired a garden for the first time in my life including a lawn, a shed, a lawnmower and actual plants. I’ve also learnt the lesson that supermarket compost is substandard (this one has petrol odour). I’ve also decided I like visiting garden centres, but only really if they have a cafe. My main challenge has been foxes defecating on the lawn.

I am a major crank about yard and garden stuff; I foster gently guided chaos and keep it very close to natural/organic.

I go through spurts of wanting to grow foodstuffs, with a functioning herb garden some years and occasionally a vegetable or two. This year we are working on a no-till lasagna bed, with a focus on native pollinator-attracting and bug-repelling plants.

I resist buying bags of soil, mulch, bark, compost. To the extent possible all the yard waste stays where it is (insert cranky old-man-yells rant here about the model where you pay people to take your leaves away and then pay people to bring you chopped up leaves. Nature did fine with recycling in place for millennia before gardeners, hmph.)

Anyway current stuff includes blueberries, blackberries, rosemary, basil, parsley, oregano, sage, mint.

I've always tended to focus on salad veg but have tried to grow flowers in the (neglected) front garden which has involved digging out lots of blackthorn and lots of hacking up roots.

Rudbeckia are looking decent. Echinops took a hammering from aphids before the ladybirds did their thing (planted is a bit distorted). Have planted quite a few fennel plants (generally green but some bronze) and have been enjoying how they are all a bit different (the neatest being one growing by accident in a crack in the path). Phlomis feel slow to grow but perhaps just what they do? Achillea and helenium seedlings have stayed dinky. It's been a good year for various salad leaves. French beans are looking promising. Runner beans, too.

For many years, I had several of this plant with lovely yellow flowers that flowered all year (if you deadheaded them) known commonly as "Giant Sea Dahlias". Unfortunately, they all died: Some of them got trampled maybe from passerbyers. Some of them maybe succumbed to too much dog urine (which I've tried to mitigate).

But I can't find them anywhere: the plant store that I originally got them at doesn't have any right now. They're apparently native to the Catalina Islands near LA (I live in San Francisco), but it doesn't seem like they're commonly sold.

I found someone selling seeds, so have started growing some from seeds. I have about 6 sprouted, but months on they've stayed dinky too...just barely grown an inch even though I have kept them moist and given them filtered sun. I wonder what's stalling them out.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/28/man-allotment-gardening-tools-arrest-armed-police-manchester

Really enjoyed a visit to Great Dixter but differently than I expected. Was expecting to be amazed by particular plant combinations and think "I need to go home and do that". More, the whole place just felt bountiful and abundant and it was the mass of planting that brought joy - it was differently skilled than I was expecting, maybe? Loved the giant fennel obviously but also enjoyed the seemingly "rogue" plants that popped up over the place. Enjoyed one of the compost heaps that had been planted with squash and nasturtiums (the heap itself was bigger than my own garden). Seemed to be lots of joy/contentment in the staff and volunteers, too. Also, they sold French workwear, which is always going to get bonus points.