Flowers to be proud of

Are the second lot of sweetpeas "Matucana"? Beautiful colour.

Do you have to pick all the sweet peas to keep them flowering? My 3 plants are giving me more than enough flowers so my thought of growing more next year might go on hold.

If you let them produce seed they will stop flowering, so either pick or dead head them regularly.

Personally I pick all the flowers that have all buds fully open every 2-3 days and stick them in vases around the house. Any that have gone over get picked and dropped at the same time. This still leaves quite a bit of colour in the garden from the partly open flowers, and fills the house with perfume (I picked 116 flowers yesterday). After 2 or 3 days the perfume has mostly gone away and they are starting to drop, so they go on the compost and I pick the next lot.

This is Linaria maroccana 'Fairy Bouquet'. Much more compact than purple toadflax, only about 1ft tall, and comes in lots of different, pretty colours. You can buy 15,000 (!!!) seeds for £1.09 from Premier Seeds Direct.

Happy how my lillies look this year, only found little lilly beetle to date.

   

Happy how my lillies look this year, only found little lilly beetle to date.

Very nice, gaffer!

I spent a very productive half hour squishing lily beetle grubs but my lillies aren't half as good as those are Boss, they're beautiful.

A few more buds open

   

Chrysanthemum crazy daisy

   

This one is beautiful and very crazy.  I was really surprised at the variation between all the crazy daisy plants. All sown from seed from the same packet. Yet a lot of them could quite easily be mistaken for ox-eye daisies. A few had a few petals out of place but not like I expected. Apart from this one.

    My small Agapanthus, grown from seed and didn’t flower last year after repotting. 25 flowers this year!!!

    Just blowing my own trumpet again, Ismene or Peruvian Daffodil, beautiful perfume and another bud to come!