Harvest #2

Our squatting sweet peas from Elsie's next door seem to have had their best time while we were away but there's still a few to come:


The dill harvest is impressive. Corrina picked about half of it to dry:

And given that the tates were packed into a really rather-too-small container they cropped pretty well ... oh, and they taste great :-)



The shallots have been slightly disappointing after last year's bumper crop, the weather this year hasn't been kind and the recent wet spell has caused a few to rot. There are still a good few that we've managed to harvest and now they're out of the ground the leeks have been planted in their place.

What 6 weeks of rain does...

... it makes everything grow, and when you go away for 3 weeks that's a lot of sald to eat!


Our plucky sprout plant's battling against the cabbage whites now - how they manage to find the only brassica for miles amazes me.

Fennelicious...

Dillicious, heheh, see what I did there...

The Garden Reaches Adolescence

Like a surly teenager the flower border is shooting upwards, outwards, generally misbehaving and looking a touch untidy. After 3 weeks away the growth is surprising and I'm already starting to think about what needs to be moved and changed for next year.

The hebe's almost lost behind the dicentra and the fucsia has exceeded all my expectations and is going to have to be moved - maybe to the front garden or possibly to the redesigned back patio. Next year there should be plenty of plants I can move or divide to fill up the rest of the garden.



The rudbekia "Indiansommer" is almost touching 2 meters now and is showing up the verbena bonariensis which was meant to be filling the gap between the helenium and the rudbekia - but there's only one shoot visible! The helenium ("Herbstonne") would be looking a touch brighter if it hadn't had a couple of weeks of rain on it but I'm very pleased with the contrast between it and the cotinus.

And then there's the plant that got me in to daisy flowers in the first place; our echinacea is thriving following its division this spring.

Stoned

We're getting close to choosing some paving now and I've put together some plans thanks to the Marshals garden designer. Here are some screen shots:

The area at the rear of the garden currently looks like this:

The plan below shows how we intend to fill it with a circular paved area and bamboo (actually, the garden designer didn't do bamboo, so I improvised with hornbeam):