Making baskets .....

... summer finally arrived in North Wales yesterday.  It was hot, humid and the Sun shone - mostly!!  In the morning we headed off to our local garden centre to get a few plants for the garden.  I'd ordered some of these "easy-fill" hanging baskets - they have holes and little gates - to make putting in plants so much easier!
Now, I know that I've left it a bit late to be making hanging baskets and a lot of the bedding plants had gone, but we got some lovely bizzie lizzies, pansies and begonias.  We also got a couple of roses for the patio - both really pretty and, best of all, actually scented too.  Roses have to have a fragrance.

I'm extremely impressed with the hanging baskets - I got them from Ideal World.  I got four baskets for £20 - a really good price.  And they are as good as they appear.  It took about 20 minutes to make each basket.  There are 17 plants in each basket, and while a bit bare at the moment - in a few weeks, so long as I remember to water them, they will be big balls of flowers!!  I particularly like the fact that the baskets have a large reservoir at the bottom, and there are four chains which come separately - makes putting in the plants and then hanging them so much easier than traditional baskets.

I had an old butler sink put into the garden last year - the plan being to make a Herb garden - but nothing happened.  Yesterday, Mum decided it was time this project was finished, so we got a selection of herbs - fennel, sage, basil, parsley, mint, caraway, to name only a few - and Mum spent the afternoon getting them into the sink!!  So I'll have a ready supply of fresh herbs on hand for cooking!!  It looks super and smells lovely.

Finally, the roses have been put into pots which line the patio edge - I can see them all from my chair in the lounge.  They look beautiful.  What's really nice about these roses is that that smell heavenly.  Some roses are pretty to look at, but don't have any fragrance - I don't understand that - to me roses must be fragrant.  And last night as I was giving them a bit more water, I could small their sweet perfume - reminding me of walking in rose gardens with my Nanna when I was a child.

I'm going to be taking photos of the hanging baskets to see just how quickly they fill out and become big balls of flowers.