From Little Acorns II

In From Little Acorns I introduced you to our little oak trees. We successfully managed to get them back to England in our little car when we came back last week. Then it was time to pot them up after a little trip to the garden centre.

We bought five 40 x 40 cm terracotta plant pots which we figured would be big enough to keep our trees in for a good while. We also bought three different types of compost to mix together after asking for advice at said garden centre. 

Firstly we mixed our compost, using a wheelbarrow, to make sure it was evenly distributed.

After adding some broken pieces of clay pots to the bottom of each plant pot for drainage, in went the compost.

Then it was time to repot the little oaks. Some of them had surprisingly impressive root systems and all seemed pretty healthy.

To help us keep track of each trees progress, we numbered the plant pots and then placed them in an out of the way place.

Now it's just time to watch them (hopefully) grow!

From Little Acorns

Back in the autumn, my wife and I decided that it might be fun to try to grow an oak tree from the hundreds of acorns that were along the sides of the roads here in Grenoble. So we picked some up. At that point we didn't really know the correct way to set them growing, so we looked it up on various websites and ended up putting the acorns we'd collected into a bag of moist compost in the fridge.

They stayed there all winter, and we retrieved the acorns in early March to plant them out. Many of them had already started sprouting so we knew they were ready.

Fast forward to now and we have a whole host of small trees growing. Pretty much each acorn that we put in the compost has started to grow! Each shoot is about 10 cm tall and developing nicely.

We plan to repot the shoots into much bigger pots when we get back to England, as we don't anticipate having anywhere permanent to plant them for a fair while. 

Any advice on how best to care for our growing trees would be greatly appreciated :)

Up the garden path ...

While it might seem like all I/we did while house-sitting was cook, it's just not true! We spent lots of time watching english tv, which was awesome, and also took on a puzzle ...

When the owners of the house left over three weeks ago they said that if we felt like it we could start laying their garden path for them. We decided to take them up on their offer!

This is what the path looked like three weeks ago:

So, using the stones laying around in various places, we made a start:

Kept going:

And this is what we managed in our first afternoon:

Not bad, huh?

The next day we did some, we managed somewhat more:

And, oh look, there I am too!

We even spotted a bird (well, my wife did):

Third day of path-making:

And we managed to finish it on Sunday, just in time really!

Cue two pretty proud people!

What you think?

Watering the plants

Although we live in a teeny tiny studio apartment, we do have the luxury of having a small balcony. I mean, it is pretty small, only really big enough for a couple of chairs, but we also have a row of window boxes out there. 

Unfortunately (gardening-wise) we moved to France mid-August, which isn't really the best time to be planting. We tried, but unsurprisingly, almost everything died!

Now that spring's popping up, the chives and, surprisingly, the lettuces(!) are starting to revive. The rosemary coped fine, but obviously stopped growing. We've also planted some acorns that we collected in the autumn and stored in the fridge over winter, in the hope that they will grow. 

However, our rosemary plant was getting very dry in it's spot, so we decided to move it to its own box in the hope that having more space would also encourage it to grow. So move it I did. 

The rosemary in its new spot

Our balcony is also south-facing which won't really help with the whole being dry thing. So, while I was on Pinterest this morning up popped a link to a tutorial for keeping your plants watered (find it here). I loved the idea, so wondered if I could do the same for our plants. What with our plant boxes being on the ledge of our balcony I didn't particularly want to use glass bottles (although we have several waiting to be recycled) so decided to make use of our plastic milk bottles.

What a beautiful milk bottle ;)

You can just about see the hole in the lid

I removed the label and cut off the bottom to allow me to be able to fill it while it's in the soil. Then I punched a hole in the lid to make the opening smaller.


With fingers crossed (not literally) I placed my bottle in the soil and filled it up with water. Much of it went straight through the bottle and came out the bottom of the plant box. Not what I wanted to happen. I took the bottle out, looked at the soil and decided I'd try again, maybe the soil was just too dry to start with. In went the bottle for a second time; I repositioned it slightly. This time, the water didn't drain straight through so I've left it out there. Hopefully this'll help the rosemary be happier, and if it works I'll think about putting some more in the other boxes. Watch this space. 

The bottle in situ