In praise of a summer

There are times when I look around our garden and find it difficult to remember the empty beds, bare trees, blizzards and deep snow of the winter (and the spring!!) months. Foliage and flowers clothe everything and a walk around the garden involves plenty of ducking and dodging as plants have outgrown their spaces in the most glorious fashion.

Our cut flower beds have been producing enough to fill several marquees!

We only moved here in October 2012 so this is our first growing season at Ty Hen Cottage. We could not have asked for better sumer weather and we have been overwhelmed with the amount of produce. We have made mistakes so have learned plenty and can do some things differently next year.

Garden produce dried, bottled, pickled , frozen etc. Still loads more to do!

We have been extracting honey and have about 100 lbs. Now I am rendering the wax to make some candles. We shall be selling our honey at the Honey Fair in Conwy on 13th September. It is a set honey as we have so many OSR fields nearby.

 

In the spring I received a parcel of assorted seeds and tubers from Carl Legge as part of the Seedy Penpal group that he organises using Twitter. It was such an interesting assortment and I got to try some new things. These Giant Sugar Peas have been amazing mange tout... they do have huge pods that stay really tender and the flower is very pretty! I shall be saving some of the seed  for next year.

 

 

This is a newly cultivated area of our field. Paul had a surge of enthusiasm after visiting CAT and created this huge allotment space. In our eagerness to get going we forgot all about the fact that we had disturbed a seed bank and have not been able to keep up with unwantd grasses and dock plants etc. Next year will be better and the areas we did get to grips with have been very productive. We made the mistake of economising on canes and the beans climbing up strings were decimated one windy weekend. We now have a great bundle of beans growing wherever they can get a hold.  After talking to others at CAT Paul  has been keen to ensure all our effors result in some sort of  'harvest' so all the stones dug from here have been harvested and used to repair the road and its made us think more seriously about composting as much as possible... needs a lot of space though! Our existing kitchen garden  of raised beds will be for  a wide variety of more unusual veg next year and this big space will be  for some of the staples.

A tranquil scene as I write this but sadly we lost a duck to a fox.