Just in time for the Easter weekend and my special offer perennials have arrived, those of you who regularly follow my blog know that I am very impulsive over buying plants. When a Thompson and Morgan email hit my in box with a one day special, 72 perennials for £9.99 I couldn’t resist.

So today they finally arrived, little plug plants a mere 2 or 3 cm tall with with great potential to be full grown flowering plants by the summer.

All the plants are great for adding lots of summer colour, year on year, to attract insects particularly bees.

My first job was a quick trip to the garden centre to buy multipurpose compost as I ran out only yesterday! Not really looking forward to the prospects of a garden centre on a rainy Easter Saturday, I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t actually too busy.

Back home and straight to the greenhouse to start potting on. I tend to use pots with 6 or 10 cells and at this stage put a couple of plugs in each cell. This is for 2 reasons, mainly because I run out of space if I have too many pots, but also it uses less compost at this stage and if the plants get too big before the summer, I can always divide them again before planting them out.

Lovely rich multipurpose compost, put into the cells and watered well ready to receive the plugs.

I use a dibber to make just the correct sized hole, which means the plug drops in beautifully without too much fuss.

Once in, press the compost around the plug and onto the next, only 71 more to go…..

An hour or so later all 72 are potted on, with labels added and another good watering done. Now just to check on them daily, watering when needed (every day) and hey presto by May 1/2 term we’ll be ready to plant them out in the garden.

I’ll let you know how I get on……

Sarah x