Through the Garden Gate--June

June has been an incredibly hot dry month especially for us in Lancashire where we  normally get a lot of rain. We are not used to having to water our gardens nearly every day, but that is how it has been. Having a new garden with new plants we have had to take care of them, and then there are the patio pots too.

But despite the dry conditions our new borders are doing well. In fact they are growing at an amazing rate. I have decided that this must be because of all the good stuff I put into the beds last autumn to improve the clay soil--top soil, mushroom compost, manure. Well it worked because the flowers are all over the place in the raised beds. It is now that I can see where plants were wrongly planted and so in the autumn or next spring I will be rearranging the plants in the borders. It will be a case of  moving some plants which did not grow as tall as I expected to nearer the front and others which are too tall to be at the front need to be moved to the back. Then there are the colour combinations which didn't quite workout.  The bright red and yellow geums are a bit of a clash of colour next to purple lychnis.

In my last garden I could never grow nepeta or cat mint as it is often known as. In my new raised beds I planted three good sized pots of nepeta and they have romped away. Holly the cat loves it and if she's not chewing on it she is often to be found curled up next to one of the plants with a sleepy look on her face. As is her friend Zeus the cat from across the road. I love the way the plant tumbles over the raised bed with the Alchemilla mollis. they make a good combination.

In the smaller raised bed at the back of the seating area I seem to have managed the planting a bit better. A gaura which I bought from a visit to Holker Hall in Cumbria last summer has lovely dark foliage and the pale pink flowers contrast well with the dark red leaved persicaria 'red dragon' and silvery lamb's ears.

Some plants I brought from the allotment bog garden and are doing quite well even in the dry conditions we have at the moment. 

It has been really too hot to do much gardening on these lovely summer days and sometimes too hot to even sit out in the sun. But we have been taking time to just relax and enjoy the garden and watch new plants bursting into flower each day.

I am linking this post to Sarah's blog at 'Down by the Sea ' for her monthly 'Through the Garden Gate'
post

A break from gardening

The last few months we seem to have been gardening non stop, working hard on getting our new garden finished and keeping up with the allotment. So I decided that now the weather was improving it was time to have a break from doing the garden and do the next best thing-- do some garden visiting and have a look at other peoples gardens. It's good to look at other gardens whether they are big formal gardens or small private ones part of the NGS. We often get some good ideas for our own garden from them.

Last weekend we visited an NGS garden called Hazlewood which is in the village of Bretherton near Leyland in Lancashire. This is the sort of garden which I like because it was made up of different garden areas so that you can't see all of the garden at a glance. 

The garden was  one and a half acres in size and included a hardy plant nursery. When we arrived we were pointed to the start of the garden which was  a small enclosed area.

Shrubs, trees and a wall gave the feeling of being completely separate from the rest of the garden. There was paving and gravel, a seating area and lots of plants in lovely terracotta pots. 

I do love a gate.

and steps

One plant in the border caught my attention. It looked like a phlomis with a smaller leaf and pink/lilac flowers. I learnt later that it was a phlomis, but wasn't available in the nursery to buy so that's one to look out for. There were interesting features as we came out of the gravel garden.

A folly with a bottle wall.

The Victorian fern house made me want to go out and buy lots of ferns.

Moving on to the rest of the garden we walked along  a wide path which had big rose arches and herbaceous borders. The new wooden arch in our garden was nothing compared to these. 

In the main part of the garden the borders were very cottagey. Beds of blue salvia, campanula, geraniums and nepeta, lovely gentle colours.

Across the lawn we followed a woodland path over a stream past the pond.

At the end of the path we found this massive spider's web made out of wire.

Out of the woodland we admired the pond.

There was a beach garden with a hammock. It looked very inviting but I don't think we were allowed to try it out.

Finally at the end of the garden was the hardy plant nursery where I bought a pink hardy geranium--'Russell Prichard'

I always get ideas from the gardens we visit, things I can do in my own garden, plants I could use, planting schemes, colours. I loved the pastel shades in some of the borders. I loved the many quirky things we spotted around the garden using old rusted gardenalia. One thing I liked was a rustic arrangement of little terracotta pots in a bigger terracotta bowl. It was so simple but looked really good.So now I know what to do with all those little pots I have at the back of my potting table.

Allotment catch up

 It seems quite some time since I blogged about the allotment, but we have been so busy. At the moment we are sharing our time between making a new garden at home and doing essential work at the allotment. It's usually alternate days. We are still enjoying good weather and haven't had rain in ages. That of course means we have plenty of watering to do.

 A few weeks ago, we started putting up frames on the plot. Wigwam frames went up for the climbing beans (Blue Lake). My friend gave me the bean plants, they looked amazingly healthy, so I am hoping for good results from them.

The cabbages needed protecting from cabbage white butterflies so they got covered with a frame and netting.

The sweet peas were planted and another frame went up. The biggest frame project though was for the fruit. We moved the blueberries to another bed earlier in the year because they needed more space so Richard made a big fruit frame for them. Last year I lost a lot of blueberries to the birds, I'm determined to get my share of them this year. The other fruit frame needed repairing too. The building of all these frames involves a lot of recycling of wood which is stored behind the shed. We have bits of metalwork too which gets put to good use.

So frames done, the next thing was to sow some peas. The first lot which were planted a few weeks ago had been started off in cardboard tubes. A week or two later I sowed some straight into the ground. I did one short row of  Kelvedon Wonder and a longer row of  Onward. I covered the rows with holly branches to deter the mice. 

The Onward germinated well, but the Kelvedon Wonder only produced two seedlings. I don't know why that is but this week I sowed another row in a different bed of Hurst Green Shaft, so I will wait to see how they do. As the peas start to grow I put twiggy sticks in amongst them for support.

I planted some courgettes last week, along with some flowers--Zinnias and sunflowers.  This week I planted a few more courgettes. They are a round variety with a long Italian sounding name which I have forgotten. I always plant more courgette plants than I really need in case any get eaten by slugs. If they don't then I will have absolutely loads of courgettes, but this doesn't usually happen and I have enough but not too many. 

I also planted more climbing beans this week--Fasold and a purple variety called Blauhilde.

The rhubarb is very big now and I have harvested several lots of it. I freeze a lot of it otherwise we would be eating rhubarb crumble nearly every day. We are still eating the rhubarb jam which I made last year.

Weeks ago I sowed rows of radish and salad leaves and they are now being harvested. The radish were the best I have ever grown.

We have been cutting a few spears of asparagus occasionally, but I feel it is not enough to warrant taking up the space on the plot so I am considering giving up with them.

Hopefully soon all the harvests will get bigger. I can already see broad bean pods forming there are flowers on the peas where pods will soon form, the cabbages are getting bigger and the strawberries are starting to turn pink. That reminds me I need to net them, I have seen one or two of them have been chewed at by some cheeky birds.

Through the garden gate--May

I'm a bit late with my end of month 'Through the Garden Gate' post, we have been so busy in the garden making the most of the beautiful weather. May is such a lovely month in the garden, everything is so fresh and green and plants are bursting into flower. After such a wet winter the sunshine has been wonderful, and we have had very little rain. The down side of it of course is that in our garden with new plants, there has been a lot of watering to be done. But we have been enjoying our new garden, watching it develop as we continue to make changes. The flower borders are looking good, it seems that every day another flower has opened. We have watched with anticipation the growth of the alliums which I planted in the autumn and they have not disappointed us. They put on a wonderful display. As the the purple ones now start to fade the white ones in another bed are just starting to come out.

I brought a lot of plants to our new garden from our old garden and now they are coming into flower it is like meeting up with old friends. The hardy geraniums were a bit of a surprise as I didn't label them. They got planted last autumn and I had to wait to see which colour they were, Some were pink, some purple, some blue.

The Alchemilla Mollis is now in flower.  I love its frothy yellow flowers

This dicentra is a new plant and I'm really loving its white flowers.

Last autumn we visited a garden centre which had a sale of all their perennial plants. There were some good bargains and so with thoughts of planting up new borders I bought a few. Two of these were geums, a red one and a yellow one. In the last few weeks I have watched them grow bigger and finally they are both now in flower. They seem really happy where I planted them in one of the new raised beds.

In the front garden the weigela is a mass of pink flowers on graceful branches. Earlier in the year I under planted it with lavender and heucheras.  It seemed a good idea at the time, but now the branches are heavy with blossom they are stopping the light getting to them. So a job which had to be done was to cut back these lower branches. But Holly the cat loves to curl up under the canopy of the branches, sometimes to have a sleep in the shade, sometimes to watch out for mice. She is catching a lot of them at the moment. I'm not sure if she is very happy about having her little hiding place removed.

I am linking this post to Sarah's 'Through the Garden Gate' blog  at 'Down by the Sea'