Life is good when you go potty

Having read your article (Yorkshire Post Magazine, July 24) about patio gardening, I thought you might like to hear of our experiences.

A year ago, we sold our house and moved into rented accommodation for what was intended to be a few months, we wanted to see where the housing market was going before we took the plunge again.

We moved to Askwith, into a barn conversion with a patio and small lawn at the front, and a side garden consisting of a patio and two lawns. We're both keen gardeners but knew we wouldn't be able to start digging out borders as the house isn't ours. So we decided to confine ourselves to pots.

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We did have 20 or 30 plants in pots brought from our previous home, but since then we have rather increased this number and having just been outside to do a quick count we now appear to have more than 90.

We are growing everything from an amelanchier to ferns, including summer bedding, hellebores, lavenders, clematis, hydrangeas, box, alpine sinks, everlasting sweet peas, phlox, Japanese maples, lupins and more. We are also growing a pot of runner beans and a half-circular wall basket containing pelargoniums and tumbling tom tomatoes. We have discovered that this is the most stress-free kind of gardening as there is hardly any weeding or pruning, and when plants finish flowering they can just be moved out of sight until next year and their spot taken with something else.

All the pots are either on the two patios, on the lid covering the Calor gas tank, or around the edge of the lawns against stone walls. The downsides? Well, only one really and that, of course, is the watering. Fortunately, we have an outside tap and a long hosepipe and so every couple of days, every day in really hot weather, the whole lot have to be thoroughly watered, which takes about 45 minutes, and every couple of weeks we feed everything, although some of the pots containing summer bedding have had long-lasting fertiliser incorporated into the planting so don't need regular extra feeding.

Of course, we live in fear of a hosepipe ban but the whole exercise has been a real eye-opener for us and has completely changed our view of the kind of garden we want when we do eventually buy another property.

PS: On our side patio we've also managed to squeeze in a table and chairs so that we can have the odd gin and tonic and sit and enjoy our garden of pots.

YP MAG 4/9/10

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