Potting on the Cyclamen seedlings.

With the rain continuing almost every day the met office has said that it is the wettest summer for 42 years. Weeding continues to be the main task in the garden with weeds seemingly appearing overnight specially in the seed pots.

The Camellias are growing apace and will have to be pruned again if they don't slow down soon, which would be a pity as all the new shoots will produce flower buds. One of the neighbours whom I met in a garden centre was very amused when I talked about pruning my Camellias, as she was having problems with a small plant in a pot that was making no progress at all. I told her to plant it into the ground with plenty of moss peat and watch it grow. I later observed her leaving with a large bag of moss peat in a trolley so I think she might have taken my advice.

Spent most of the week potting on Cyclamen seedling plants into 6cm pots. I know that they would be better in a slightly larger pot but I just don't have the space. The Hederifolium type were potted first as they are always the first to flower, and indeed some of they were already sporting flower buts tucked close to the tuber. Removing the grit topdressing from the pots of the mother plants revealed hundreds of flower buds just waiting on the right conditions to put their heads up.

Twelve hundred pots later and the seedlings had all been taken care of, but that posed another problem. Where was I going to put them all? With all the rain, small tubers newly potted might rot if the compost stayed wet for long periods, so I thought I had better find them some shelter for a while.

With a bit of thoughtful reorganization most of them were accommodated under the benches in it the two alpine houses and the rest were found a place in the north-facing frame at the back of the potting shed. That leaves just the mother plants to be taken care of, but as the seed pods are not quite ripe yet I won't pot them on until after the seed harvest. I had to move some of them from the north-facing frame to the one beside the alpine house that faces south in an effort to ripen the seed because of the lack of heat and sun.

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