Early August in the Garden

Ten good things about the garden today:

1. Sunshine for the first time in what feels like aaaages. The flowerbed looked luminescent in the dusk. Rudbekia turning from brown to orange.

2. The dahlias are coming out more and more - every day a new one seems to split out if its bud.

3. The sweet peas are still grow-grow-growing!

4. Cutting back the valerian seems to be making them flower even more.

5. The pumpkin towers seem to be working - lots of pumpkins and squashes setting, as well as glorious veg spaghetti. Considering butternut squash for next year...

6. Two new remaindered plants bought by A from Sandra's world - Señorita Blanca and Señorita Rosilitta. (£2 each!) Now out in the garage bed.

7. Glorious cucumbers from the conservatory - on the fourth one already, one huge one on the plant, two medium ones and still more setting!

8. Five tomatoes from the tomato plants! (Edited to add: Six! I got it wrong!)

9. Beautiful bunch of flowers for T's birthday - love-in-a-mist, cosmos, poppies, white antirhinnums, Michaelmas daisies, mint and one piece of clarkia.

10. The Bramleys are all rosy on their tops ready for a bumper autumn harvest.

Interesting facts about cucumbers:

These are apparently all alternative uses for cucumbers... Believe as you wish!

• Rub cucumber skin on a fogged about post-shower mirror and it will disappear without smears
• 'Cool as a cucumber' was coined because it actually cools the blood and, applied topically, will reduced facial swelling, hence the use in DIY kits.
• Cucumbers are a good substitute for chewing gum: the phytochemicals will kill bacteria that cause bad breath.
• The steam from a boiled cucumber, when breathed in, is a destresser.
• Waxy skin can be used to erase mistakes when made in pen.
• Cucumbers are a better pick-me-up than energy drinks due to the preponderance of B vitamins and carbohydrates.
• Use cucumber slices in a tin to repel pests from your garden. (if only it were that simple...)
• Cucumbers are a good cure for a hangover.
• Use cucumber peel instead of shoe polish.
• A 'green' way to clean sinks etc: rub a cucumber slice on dirty surfaces to remove years of tarnish and bring back the shine.

See if any of these work? Not sure I'll bother...

E x

August 4th

A busy week at Coombe cottages!

The allottment bed 

It's  out with the browning feverfew, harvested onions, garlic, peas and potatoes and in with the baby leeks and some winter greens (Chinese cabbage and pak choi), the cosmos and dahlias are taking over a bit in terms of colour and height is now dominated by lots of towers of climbing pumpkins and squashes.

The flower beds

They are spilling over with cat nip, lavender and seeded geraniums and really need tidying but there is still color with the echinops, Michaelmas daisies and cosmos...

The conservatory and Mollytunnel

The cucumber plants have been hugely prolific with fruits a really wonderful flavour, the peppers and chillis had a huge knock back with white fly then a burn like reaction to ecover washing up liquid but are slowly coming back, the geranium are still flowering away, and the tomatoes are coming on despite their dislike of the white polythene of the sheep tunnel. 

The sun bed 

It just keeps going - sunflowers and dahlias out, antirhinnums, poppies, love in the mist,  statice, alliums, rudbeckias, teasels all continuing.

Stars of the week have to be the gladioli still - more colours - I didn't know gladioli could be like this! 

Funny fact of the week about gladioli: The singer Morrissey is known to dance with gladioli, hanging from his back pocket or in his hands, especially during the era of The Smiths.This trait of his was made known in the music video for "This Charming Man", where he swung a bunch of yellow gladioli while singing.

Week 12 in the gardens of the west- 22 July

We can't keep up with it all!

20 bags of red currants 14 of red gooseberries 4 of green gooseberries 4 of black currants and more still to come... The Bramley is brimming and the mulberries are getting bigger and slightly pink. It feels like everything is rushing faster and faster.

There are new flowers every day - pink love-in-the-mist:

butterfly gladioli,

bright daylillies, the first of the sunflowers - a dark chocolate variety,

the bright white of the old Michaelmas daisies 

and the wonderful helterskelter tassles of the teasels. 

The vegetables are in abundance too - the best brassicas ever including some very presentable cauliflowers and hispi cabbage, a mountain of peas and a great tangle of pumpkin vines now enveloping all the tiny crannies of old potatoe and broad bean plots. 

Beautiful (but sort of useless for eating) glove artichokes.

Good week in the garden - rain and sun, good for the garden.

Week 11 in the South West

2 CC

The garden looks like it's going over a bit, sadly. BUT there are still some really beautiful bits. The garden is bi-coloured with mostly white and green: green of all the veg leaves, and white from this lovely flower:

 We're not sure whether it is chamomile or feverfew! We've done lots of research online (where would we be without google?), but the jury's still out. There are two slightly different varieties - maybe one is feverfew and the other chamomile? Any suggestions welcome!

Lots of rain this week - which is great for everything grow-grow-growing! (Including the slugs... A has been diligently picking them off at night, and she found 30 on Wednesday!! All munging the lovely veg and the dahlias.) The field is greening up again after the hay making too, so it's looking much prettier from the house - and better for the sheep.

Lots of firsts this week!

A and J ceremonially ate the first tomato last night - apparently it was very good.

The first sunflower is out! We think it may be a little confused actually as we weren't expecting them until late August (normal time), but never mind!

First gladioli out - beautiful, and a bonus as we weren't expecting flowers until next year.

First peas eaten - apparently very good.

And thousands and thousands and thousands (maybe a slight exaggeration) of redcurrants. Beautiful on the bush - glistening jewels of red colour against the green. Also blackcurrants and gooseberries, and raspberries from a neighbour. Drowning in soft fruit! Lots in the freezer, raspberry jam, redcurrant jelly, crumbles, little tartlets and on cereal every morning.

Slugs coming back in force, although A doing very well on slug patrol.

Broad beans and sugar snaps over, making way for squashes and pumpkins. Beautiful courgette and huge cucumber picked this week.

All looking very good - and the cutting patch is about to spring into even more colour!

Week 10 in the South West

The Orchard

It's been a happy and encouraging week at the orchard with soft fruit bushes bending with delicious produce ... loganberries, blueberries and wonderful sweet plump cultivated blackberries. The blackberries are a revaluation, no tartness just a bomb of sweet juice.

I must mention the apricots which look so golden and gorgeous. I stewed a couple that fell and they were brill. How amazing to be able to grow edible apricots. The tree is only in its second year.

All the veg is growing a treat and the nets are discouraging the pigeons. So far the deer are sparing our beans and beetroot, but we have to be vigilant.

The flower patch is gradually filling up and I have given away lots of bunches this week... Snap dragons, gazanias, gyp (saved from the rabbits with fleece... such a fab cutting flower), cornflowers, Veronica.

The Larkspur has failed but I must try again next year as it is great for cutting.

The rubekia is growing sturdily with a promise of golden blooms in August through to frost, if the orchard creatures spare them.

Solomon's seal is being munged a bit, but going strong.

The Garden

Successes! 

A left for a conference in Cambridge on the 9th with a box full of garden produce for T and H: the first beautiful green cucumber, the umpteenth bouquet of sweet peas, a good dose of broad beans, a bunch of herbs, the first three baby beetroots, and the second picking of courgettes, two punnets of soft fruit (red gooseberries and redcurrants) all on a bed of Coombe Cottage hay!

So, the big story of the last two weeks is the hay! It was cut by a neighbour on 29th June, turned daily until July 3rd and put into bales on that day ahead of a promised thunderstorm (which never came...).

Alliums finally showing their colours:

Beautiful persian buttercups (definitely getting more next year - thank you Father Christmas):

The rose tree over, mulberries coming on, sunflowers growing, a huge patch of old raised bed rescued from the weeds and glorious sunshine for reading outside. 

Interesting fact of the week:

Everyone knows the phrase of 'make hay while the sun shines!' Great aphorism about taking opportunities whilst you can (which we certainly managed with the field - checking the forecast about six times a day became very addictive). 

This proverb is first recorded in John Heywood's A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1546:

Whan the sunne shinth make hay. Whiche is to say.

Take time whan time cometh, lest time steale away.

Many proverbs exist in other languages, but this one doesn't and it's a reasonable surmise that the phrase is of English Tudor origin.

Is it really week 7 in the garden?

We are too busy to stop and write much BUT at 2 Coombe cottages we have been:

(glorious buzz-buzz-buzzing of bees on the cat mint)

1. Planting out the final marrows and squashes in the old forget-me-not raised bed, and Cosmos in all the little gaps we can find.

(Rose at the front of the house)

2. Doing some final sowings of pak choi, carrots, spring onions and beetroot in big tubs (emulating S's orchard) 

(The allotment - potatoes in the foreground)

3. Eating potatoes, sugar snaps, cut and come again lettuce and spinach.

(The cutting patch - you can see the stocks have come up!)

4. Filling the house with the scent of sweet peas, stocks and feverfew.

We are excited by the sunflowers and dahlias and even the late planted Persian buttercups look like they might flower this year, and the toads are establishing well in the allottment triangle, cleverly making homes underneath planks and pots. 

(E has a view of this from her window!)

And the best flower of the week has to be the Rose 'tree'. This was a cutting from Mickeys garden in Suffolk and planted in ?1995 when we forts came to the house. It was planted to grow up I a dying ornamental prunus -  the prunus is now happy and the Rose dominates the garden for two wonderful weeks in June/July.

Interesting fact of the week: In China, they see the "TOAD," not the "man" in the moon. The toad is also considered "one of the five poisons of yin." They say that eclipses happen when the "toad in the moon" tries to swallow the moon itself!

And why gardeners love toads:

• Common Toads produce a toxin from a pair of glands on their back which makes them distasteful to would-be predators.
•  They may remain in one area for long periods over the summer months, hunting for slugs, spiders and insects at night.
• Toadlets and adults spend the winter buried down in mud, under compost heaps or amongst dead wood. 

Week 6 in the gardens

It's been a beautiful sunny week leading up to the longest day so the gardens are all preparing for productivity! The CC household are contemplating stopping the veg box order for the summer with the prospect of spicy salad leaves, chard and spinach, sugar snap peas and potatoes all begin being harvested in the next week.

The Coombe cottage garden 'allotment' triangle has switched from blues and purples and pinks to a lovely dapled pattern of green and tiny white flowered towers of peas, feverfew and foliage.

Best plants of the week have been 

1. The mixed sweet peas ( sown 18 January inside - Frangatissima, Turquoise lagoon and Purple Pimpernel as well as a few unannmed saved sed from 2014) We started picking this week, and the scent is fantastic. We are planning to give a bunch away every other day.

2. The night stocks  ( sewn 1 March and planted out 26 April)  are beginning to bloom - we'd thought they would be white but have come through beautifully pink, white and purple. We can't bear to pick them yet!

3. The bright star-white flowers of love in-the-mist - the contrast between the green frondy foliage and the white is even better than the traditional blue.

4. The cutting patch is coming along nicely with the alliums finally beginning to burst at the front and the sunflowers at the back starting the spurt to the sky phase of their lives. The technique of planting in a trench which you then earth up to give more support seems to be working alongside the new support canes and wires. 

Casualties have been few this week - black flies are continuing to really plague the beans, and are now even spreading through the feverfew and bolted spinach. We are continuing to knock them off with a hose. We really need to plant earlier in the year. 

And are those alliums going to burst? They've been at the point of flowering for nearly 6 weeks! 

The orchard allottment

S returned from her French meanderings to a mega-weeding week and now the cutting patch is coming along well. There look to be lots of lovely self sewn flowers from last year coming through. The summer palace was celebrated by book group with a balmy summer evening without any insects swarming! 

Best plants are those amazing carrots again- we swear they've put on 6 inches in a week, 

the bright orange of the calendula, and the fantastically fruitful loganberries and blueberries.

Difficulties are with the gypsophilia-n-bean-eating rabbits. However s and r are finding the organic repellant they applied before going (liquid fence) may be working after all our doubts. 

Fact of the week: For centuries, carrots have been connected with health benefits. In the Middle Ages, carrots were believed to cure anything from sexually transmitted diseases to snakebites. Carrots became associated with vision, particularly night vision, during World War II. The British Royal Air Force published a story that said skilled fighter pilot John "Cats' Eyes" Cunningham could thank a steady diet of carrots for his night vision flying prowess. In response to the story, many British people began to grow and eat more carrots. They wanted to improve their vision so that they could see better during the compulsory blackouts that were common during World War II. Although Cats' Eyes' carrot eating made for a great story, it was, in fact, propaganda put out to conceal the fact that the Royal Air Force's was actually using radar to locate Luftwaffe bombers during the night.