CUT HYACINTHS

While we have a lovely sunny day here today in West Yorkshire, it is kicking up a storm out there and now and then sleet-like rain lashes down.  It's bitterly cold.  Driving home from the supermarket today there was big empty trash cans hurtling (yes, hurtling) down the road and just missing the traffic. I noticed when I got home that the lovely free-standing trough of yellow hyacinths has taken a battering.  The individual little star-like flowers have coped well with the strong wind but the over all flowers have keeled over and looked pathetic.  They are a lot paler than they were when they first opened.  I'd be pale too if I had to tolerate that wind bashing me around for hours on end.  I have cut the flowers and brought them in so that they can fill my home with their perfume.  You have to be careful with hyacinths though, if you didn't know.  I didn't know until a couple of years ago when a garden centre had a sign up warning customers that hyacinth bulbs can cause skin irritation and that people should not handle them.  I've never had problems with plants but it's just as well to treat them with respect.  I expect the sap from the stems will be an irritant too.  Apparently they are toxic to cats and dogs, including the bulbs. 

I've popped my hanging baskets outside, on the ground, out of the wind, so that the plants can have a bit of sunshine and so that the plants don't get too 'soft'.  Putting out plants that have not been hardened off by acclimatising them to outside conditions, can shock them.  I meant to mention that although the bacopa that I planted in the baskets were full of big white flowers, I have chopped back the stems to just above a leaf joint so that the individual plants thicken up and produce more shoots and, in time, many many more flowers.  I don't just want a couple of stems per plant. 

And now time for a movie.  http://movies-and-books-world.blogspot.co.uk/