Winter planting in Dubai with #HDYGG

As I've been away during October and November I missed the optimum planting time, so I've cheated a little and bought some bedding plants for the pots and tomato plants for the garden, while I wait for the seeds I planted today to grow.

You'd think the ground would be as hard as rock, in this heat and with very little rain, but my garden is sand, just sand and as soon as you push down on the spade, the ground just gives way, so despite the heat it was really quick and easy to transplant the plants from the sandpit into their new homes.

I also purchased two climbers for the front wall of the house, I'll worry about what is going to support them when they start to grow, but looking at the neighbours walls, all I need is string which I tie to a brick and chuck over into the street for the climbers to cling to.

The seeds are planted and this time they are labelled so no surprises and I'm having another go at growing sunflowers, sweet peas, nasturtiums and poppies. I've enjoyed recycling items around the home, including my old shopping bag and I'm going to feed the birds using seeds, peanut butter and toilet rolls.

I'm a little annoyed with the gardner, which I use in the loosest of terms, he comes 5 days a week, for an hour a day and rather than garden he sweeps, runs the hosepipe for most of the hour, washing things down and once a month, when we have it, he mows the grass. This week he decided to cut back all the neighbours bougainvillaea, which I was hoping to cultivate and have it growing over our side of the wall, it also provide good shade for some of my plants. The main advantage of having a gardener is that I can do whatever work I want, without having to clean up after myself.

While the seeds are growing I'm going to dig over the sand pit and rid it of all its weeds, before the next lot of planting, in the meantime it lights up at night with some outdoor lights, which I will be adding to.

We delayed investing in the garden as we needed to make sure our visas would be renewed by hubbies company at the end of the first year and that the house was available to rent for the 2nd year. our new contract doesn't include a rent increase for next year, so it is likely we'll stay put until the end of 2017.

It is still hot during the day, but the sun now disappears round the other side of the house by 11am daily, which gives plenty of shade for me to be able to sit out in, before it gets dark around 5.30pm so I can get chance to actually enjoy sitting in the garden, rather than working in it.

I paid a trip to Safa Park again this week, mainly to take photographs of the building works and the new canal, they started not long after we moved here. While I was there I decided to photograph some trees. The planting of them appears to be random and I love how the buildings soar upwards and the trees grow sideways.

This weekends plans involve investing in some adult sized gardening gloves, trying to buy some strawberry plants and decide what we are going to do with this patch of sand, currently used by the neighbourhood cats as a toilet. Top left of the photo is a pile of bricks, purchased by the previous tenants to pave the sand over, which we are thinking about doing, which would mean less water being used and we could use the area under the tree which does provide quite a bit of shade in the summer. I'm also off to the Miracle Gardens on Saturday to take a look at the new planting.

Sewing seeds and taking cuttings with #HDYGG?

I’m leaving Dubai for 2 weeks on the 8^th of September with hubby and as there will be no one there to water the plants, I am officially shutting the garden down for the rest of summer.

The sandpit has had a good weeding

The grass patch at the side of the house is being prepared for seeding

I’ve decided to spend the next few weeks researching and experimenting with cuttings and seeds, so that I can learn what grows, where it grows and under what conditions.

I've taken cuttings from several plants in the garden and they are staying alive by refreshing the water daily, inside the house and within 3 days roots were growing. I'm also attempting to grow an avocado.

Although sweet peas, nasturtiums and poppies need regular temperatures of below 15c to flower, they will provide plenty of leaves, they also require temperatures under 30c to germinate so they are sitting in the conservatory where the cat and dog spend most of their time and the air con keeps the room at a max of 30c.

There is plenty of natural light in the room and I will probably plant them out into pots to grow and hopefully flower in that room.

The three basil plants are the only survivors of my previous planting trial and they now have a woody stem, so I’m hopeful they’re bush out. They sit on the window ledge outside, which gets sun for part of the day and I water them daily.

The tomatoes grew into decent sized plants, but didn’t flower. This may have something to do with them being planted in recycled water cooler bottles. It’s best to use unglazed pots for planting outside in the heat. The soil in plastic pots reaches temperatures of 50c and moving them into grow bags did nothing for them.

Once autumn comes I will sew more seeds into clay pots and purchase a couple of tomato plants from the garden centre along with some tomato plants. I am quite prepared to move them into the conservatory as the whole villa is tiled and and easy to clean.

As well as planting some tomato seeds I’m also experimenting with spring onions, lettuce and chilli. They too are being kept on the window ledge with the basil.

This tomato and marigold seeds were sown on Thursday, this photo was taken 3 days later, unbelievable that anything can grow in this heat.

I successfully grew marigolds, petunias and celosia this year so I’m focusing on growing them again. These seeds are sitting in direct sunlight for most of the day and are watered daily.

Although these seeds are being grown in pots in compost, for purposes of germination time. They will be sown directly into the sandpit as plants that flower in Dubai do better without root disturbance, although I grew the last seedings in recycled newspaper pots, few of the plants flowered and the ones that did were very pale in comparison to the illustration on the seed packet. I will mix some compost into the top layer of soil before doing so.

You can see the celosia has very shallow roots.

My next job is to find out what jobs I need to do around the garden to prepare for autumn.