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Plants, Camera, Action!

 


The aquilegia have been glorious this year, bringing washes of colour to my small urban garden. A trip to Carr Farm Garden Centre, in Meols, yielded several new plants which I've already potted on. The clematis Westerplatte (dark red) and clematis Multi Blue (purple/violet) have each found homes in the wooden troughs-with-trellis that I bought last summer, one in each, and they're sharing those with some lavender. A sturdy Dicentra spectabilis, more commonly named as Love Lies Bleeding because of its dangly pink heart-shaped flowers, needed to be re-potted immediately as it had clearly outgrown the pot it was sold in. If all goes well it should flower every year for years to come.

I also bought a small tray of pink pelargonium Zonale. Now, until last summer I wasn't keen on geraniums or pelargoniums, (don't ask me which is which!), as I always felt they were too obvious and safe a choice. But then  bargain price tempted me to buy some, and they went on to flower for seemingly months on end. Consequently, I've warmed to them a bit.

One disappointment was the lupin, the white and purple West Country Blacksmith, not due to any fault of the plant itself but because the resident garden snails love it too much. Consequently I've had to hide it inside the greenhouse on a wire mesh shelf which makes it much harder for the pesky things to slide up and munch its leaves into oblivion. This is not an ideal location for any lupin. For one thing, there is not enough height inside the greenhouse, which is one of those light-weight plastic things. Years ago, before we moved here, back when we had hens pottering freely round the garden, we rarely saw a slug or snail as the hens devoured the lot, but here there are far too many urban foxes to risk having birds again, as fun as they are to watch. If you have any anti-snail, anti-slug ideas, please leave your comments below, keeping in mind that we have dogs and visiting cats and so don't want to put poison down.

I've been spending a fair amount of time working on my YouTube channel. When I began this channel, many years ago, I just used it like a photo album to store moving images of things that interested me.  I uploaded new videos once every blue moon, and gave no thought at all to organising the channel the "right way".  No wonder, then, that the audience didn't grow.

However, for some time now I've been developing this channel, uploading new videos fairly regularly, improving thumbnails, titles and descriptions, and have created playlists so the content is organised. Thanks to Clipchamp I'm now able to create Shorts (videos in a vertical format that look like they've been filmed on a smart phone even when they haven't, as I don't own one; and which last under one minute). I'm using Shorts as a way of (hopefully!) steering people towards my longer videos. My subscription list and watch times are still very low but better than they were.

Visit my YouTube channel and share your ideas on how I can further improve it. What kind of videos would you like to see more of?

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