Green Fingers - Sedum's grown from cuttings

The name of this blog is Polish, Plants & More..., well I have had plenty of posts about polish, a few about "more", but only two about plants.

When I started this blog, the two things in my life keeping me sane were my growing polish collection and my garden, so it made sense to blog about both. I've been very slack when it comes to the plant posts, so to make up for it I've put this post together.

I love my garden, but I haven't had much money to spend on it, plants are surprisingly expensive, my way round not being able to buy many plants is to grow my own from cuttings, I'm still not a great gardener so I stick to plants that will grow easily, one type is called Sedums, they're evergreen and cover the ground well so help keep the weeds down.

I took cuttings from a few plants and thought it'd be fun to show you what I do...

Some cuttings I took from my garden, with the lower leaves removed, and one with some little roots.

Green fingers in March

Now the weather's getting warmer I've started doing stuff in the garden again, I really want to have it looking like a proper garden rather than just mud and weeds by the summer.

Before Christmas I'd started getting rid of the weeds, it's such a large area so I'm doing small bits at a time, I'd turned the soil over where I wanted borders, and then put weed fabric down to keep that bit weed free. The fabric seems to have done the job, there's only a few small weeds growing under it so I'm happy about that.

I sat and drew an aerial view of what I'd like the garden to look like once every thing's grown, there's going to be an area that's surrounded by climbing plants that will have a bench, it'll be a garden within a garden full of scented flowers. The rest of the garden will have borders either side that nearly meet in the middle of the garden and then open up to reveal more space which will have a bench and a pond for wildlife.

My doodle of what I'd like my garden to look like

I've never had a garden before so it's really exciting to start from scratch, but also very daunting as I'm having to learn as I go along. One thing I really love is getting plants for free, I love taking cuttings of plants and watching them grow, as I've got no money to spend on the garden getting anything for free is great. Luckily last year my boyfriend and I got quite a few plants from garden centres, most of them were reduced as they were a bit dead, but I've nursed most of them back to life.

Green Fingers - Something a little bit prickly

I thought we'd have a change of scenery today, so no nail polish, but a bit of planty stuff instead.

I thought I'd show you my Cactus plants, you're probably not that interested, but I think they're really cool so I'm hoping there'll be someone else out there that like's these prickly plants. :-)

I grew up being really curious about Cacti because my Grandma had a greenhouse jam packed with them, they were in her house too, and I learnt early on not to touch them or I'd get prickled. I found them really beautiful, they had the most amazingly bright flowers that looked as if they had been stuck on. I guess the thing that I really loved was how many of them there were, it was a sea of cacti, and I've always been a collector so I guess it's no surprise I was drawn to them.

Last year I started learning about gardening and plants after gaining a massive garden to play in, after growing a few plants and gaining a bit of confidence I thought I'd try something a bit more exotic, my lovely boyfriend treated me to some cacti, and I gave them a home on one of our window sills where they've been happily sunning themselves ever since.

So here's my cute little cacti family.

Here's Bob & Billy, not really, I haven't actually named them.