A Good Time

..had by all.

The Summer In The Garden open weekend was a great success, even if we did have thundery downpours on Sunday - everyone still managed to tour the garden before popping into the barn for some homebaked buns.....luckily very few buns left - the kids have eaten the leftovers...save me from further toothache and a growing muffin.

All of the lovely feedback makes the hard work worthwhile....who am I kidding...even if no other soul was to step foot in the place, I would still pack in a 70 hour week.....one could have a worse addiction, like prosecco and rolo (my current consumption)..so much for no toothache.

Trusty waitresses - my daughter and her friends.

A Rosy Post

The roses are looking lovely at the minute, the warm, dry, sunny weather suits them - they hate rain so the past few summers have been miserable for them.

We have over 100 roses in the garden, with over 70 different varieties but a few really do stand out among the crowd - for disease resistance, scent, prolific flowering....I thought I would share them with you!


Rosa virginiana

A wild rose from America, it makes a lovely hedge with bright pink single flowers which the bees love, followed by bright red hips and beautiful autumn colour - it grows quickly and can be easily clipped into a hedge or allowed to run free. It's also disease free.

Queen of Denmark

An old alba rose with a delicious scent and beautifully formed pale pink blooms...very healthy, it makes a large shrub.

Ispahan

A damask rose with double pink blooms in abundance, whose heady scent fills the air of a warm evening, it blooms for a longer period than most of the old roses - through summer into autumn. Although described as a shrub, we grow ours along posts and wire as it is in a relatively shady position beneath trees, facing east.

Blush Noisette

What can I say except you have to see this in the flesh to appreciate the volume of flowers - it is literally covered in thousands of blooms and buds. The flowers are small, in clusters with a strong clove scent, the foliage rich and glossy. It forms a vigorous shrub / climber which reached 6-8 feet.

Bonica

A continual flowering shrub rose with clear pink flowers, good disease resistance and attractive foliage - the flowers are semi double. Again, ours is grown in semi shade, facing east and still flowers its socks off!

Rose Camaieux

A lovely old gallica rose with flowers heavily striped and splashed with a deep pink which then beautifully fades to lilac grey. A lovely fragrance and not very big so could be grown in a large pot.

Lastly - I'm quite excited by this rose which I featured in a winter post when the rose was purchased. 

Rosa multiflora plataphylla Seven Sisters (Try saying that after a few glasses of wine!)

I planted it in a gap at the base of the hawthorn hedge along the lane, facing north and forgot all about it. I was driving up the lane this evening and noticed a splash of colour. It is covered in bloom despite its size. It will hopefully scramble through the hedge in time. There is a better description than I could give on the internet - click here to read. Basically its name refers to the various shades of pink / purple blooms and it does well on poor soils.

And The Heat Goes On...And On

I'm such a moan....still hoping for rain - not a drop has fallen on the garden for exactly two weeks today...it doesn't seem an awfully long time but the intense heat and the fact that I have planted so many new beds and plants everywhere is a bit of a nuisance.

Our cottage garden sits beneath the mature ash trees so that with any prolonged dry spell, they suck every drop of moisture from the earth. I suppose I should be grateful that we still have ash trees...for now.

The roses are loving the constant sunshine and are flowering better than ever before. This evening, the sea mist has rolled in which makes a refreshing change...can plants eat mist? I wish!

Rosa damascena Ispahan - a wonderful, easy to grow, old rose and although once flowering, it flowers over a long period of time. This one faces east and so doesn't get much sun but still flowers its socks off.

A jugful of old roses.

Sunny Skies, Happy Days

Am writing this post with a sunburnt back....funny how us Celts/Vikings/whatever we are, never learn the power of the sun on our fair skin, but how good does it feel to have a glow instead of a shiver - I'm loving the decent dose of vitamin D that so many of us lack (and that "they" now think the lack of is linked to so many of our health problems). That's my excuse anyway..where was I...off topic as usual.

The veg garden is now starting to look like a veg garden as opposed to a sorry excuse for one, this Spring it was so pathetic that I almost decided to skip veg this year and only the impending garden group visits and open weekends shamed me into getting my act together. And lo and behold, sowing a lot of stuff later than usual, in modules in the tunnel (beetroot, spinach, rainbow chard, rocket, mustard leaves etc) and then planting out is very satisfying as you have an instant effect, plants are more robust to fight off slugs etc.

The strawberries have been netted for the first time against the birds and we're having a bumper crop, they taste superb - as does any good home grown produce v supermarket offering.

The redcurrants and blackcurrants are still behind and rather poorly cropping this year as they are intermixed, not labelled, and therefore never pruned properly (redcurrants - you prune each branch to a third of its original length, whereas blackcurrants you prune one third of the oldest stems to the base). In winter, almost all of the branches were heavily pruned and so, we have hardly any blackcurrants. Lesson learnt - label your plants properly!

Susie loves redcurrants and gleans more than the blackbird, when they're still tart & hardly ripe, strange taste buds my daughter, from an early age, she could be found eating peppery nasturtium leaves, calendula flowers, beech leaves from the hedge, parsley by the bucket load, we could hardly grow enough to keep up!