Nature on Your Doorstep Community

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Welcome to the Greenfingers forum 2013! Share your garden snaps and stories!

Want to share your gardening exploits with the rest of us, got a question about a plant or looking for some ideas on gardening for wildlife or do you just want to show off your garden? Well then the greenfingers forum is for you.

It is part of the Homes for Wildlife group so if you want to post you will have to join, look for the icon on the right hand side of the page! This post will remain sticky on the homepage for a while to help you find it, otherwise you can get here by looking in wildlife and the Homes for Wildlife.

What better way to introduce your garden than posting a picture or tour of your own little patch of nature. So whatever garden space you have be it balcony, patio or postage stamp garden to acres of lovingly tended garden space, it would be great to see what you are getting up to! Here is a quick glimpse into my garden to get the ball rolling...

Plants are a dwarf gorse and a berberris and these are common frogs!

Warden Intern at Otmoor.

  • I have the stuff EVERYWHERE! It came in in ton bags of topsoil and has spread all over the place. I've just spent the evening on Google trying to find out what on earth it is.

    A closed mouth gathers no foot.

  • Nope, no prickliness. Just a bit of light fuzz. Maybe you have some sort of freaky hybrid triffid!

    A closed mouth gathers no foot.

  • I'm hoping the flowers will give us the answer to this mystery triffid!!! The suspense is killing me!

    Warden Intern at Otmoor.

  • Yellow flowers...hmmm, after a quick look around I wonder if it's prickly lettuce which I think is also known as compass plant?

    Warden Intern at Otmoor.

  • I've just caught up with this thread after losing it - great photos!  And my new camera arrived at last so I hope to be able to play with it and see if I can get some photos.

    I was sitting in the sun this morning with a cup of coffee and some about a dozen stripy hoverflies hoovering up pollen on a pot of african lilies. The sun's gone in now but it may brighten later so fingers crossed. The lilies are interesting; no scent like the orientals but they've turned from a rather garish orange to a white and come up every year. I like to have something the hoverflies like because their larvae polish off aphids like Higgy's blue tit.

  • Steady on Alan, what websites have you been visiting? I read that the leaves were edible and the stem exudes latex but the alternative to opium bit wasn't mentioned!!!

    To be honest with those spikes it doesn't appeal as a novel addition to my salad either!

    Warden Intern at Otmoor.

  • Interesting stuff! Glad we got to the bottom of it eventually!

    Anyone else had any unusual plants self seed in the garden? Got something you don't know the name of, post it in the Greenfingers forum and we'll try and track it down for you!

    Warden Intern at Otmoor.

  • I have to say having now only got the 'identification' part of this thread that it looks like some form of Hawkweek. Are you happy with the current 'prickly lettuce' ID? Never heard of it myself! LOL

    Best

    Higgy

  • Sorry I interrupted the identification discussion; I was too excited to have found this thread again.

    I sowed a packet of wildflower seeds into a raised veggie bed. I'm not growing them this summer apart from lettuce (not prickly) so I thought I'd help out the insects some more. The bed is too crowded and next year I'm going to sow into plugs as Higgy does but the insects are enjoying it.

    I think I have wild camomile (the petal reflex as the flower ages); yellow ox-eye daisy; cornflowers; and poppies which are starting to open. I've just tried out my new camera which is much more complicated than my old one so the photos aren't wonderful.

  • I'll try Alan. I can only add one at a time; a second just replaces the first.