I’m not wishing the yet-to-arrive summer away, though I am looking forward to some warmer weather, but this post is one which takes a look at my garden and prompts some memories from last September. As you’ll know somehow I missed a whole series of posts at the time, but I don’t want to miss them from this space completely.
The patio remained lush and the white roses kept on flowering. These roses have multiple blooms which seem to last forever, but shed their petals in an instant almost if you look at them too hard. I think the insect in the photo above is judging if they’ll do that before making its move.
The sedums were starting to turn pink, whereas the geraniums which are now a few years old were already a faded pink.
Outside the greenhouse our baby squash was still going strong and looking promising. However - spoiler alert - it didn’t make it dropping off the plant without growing or ripening further. We didn’t have much success with courgettes, squash or tomatoes last year which was a shame, but something to work on.
Elsewhere in the garden the leaves from the laurel were already falling and turning brown. These were just the first of the leaves we collected over the winter months, and which we store to make leaf mulch making use of one of those very large builders bags. It’s big and bulky but thankfully relatively easy to shove and lug out of view.
We had more success with our runner beans and like in other years a steady supply kept up our bean levels up. Even these weren’t as prolific as usual and we think that’s probably because the light levels in our garden were lower than in previous years as our trees are at their largest having not been cut for a good few years. They’re even taller this year, so I’ll be choosing what we grow carefully to maximise the potential.
I almost can’t believe it was last September that our lighting masterplan was formed, on a post-it naturally. We bought the lights, and the hooks to put them up with and with a few days of them arriving the weather changed - sorry! It was only recently that I found the hooks again, but as the weather has been so bad we haven’t got around to putting them up. Given the winds last week, where we had a few branches down, that seems to have been a good decision.
Let’s hope we’ll get them up soon, and that we have plenty of opportunity to use and enjoy them.
The year was good for our ornamental quince though, these are the largest I’ve seen since we’ve lived here. I don’t think it was just the good weather though, the previous year it had a really good prune, so both probably contributed to its very good year!
MOH is very fastidious about picking up leaves, and clearly at one point I caught him sweeping the grass - too good not to include here!
I grew some sweet peas from seed and this pastel pink one was a particular favourite. At the back of the garden the pear tree had a bumper crop of pears, though unfortunately even the squirrels reject these as they’re often like bullets, and usually there’s not enough pears to bother cooking to see if that makes a difference.
We weren’t the only one to enjoy our garden during the month, our neighbour’s cat definitely made itself comfortable and made the most of the warmth from the roof of the little shed. It’s a tough life, hey?
