It’s been a quiet few weeks at The Secret Acre having been unexpectedly struck down by pestilence and plague. I spent the hottest day of the year, shivering under a duvet, unable to get warm. Annoying when there is so much to do. Hopefully we can start getting back to the harvest soon.
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It’s been a difficult year for plants and wildlife suffering the stuck weather systems of climate change. A worry for the extremes to come.
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It has been the usual busy summer period here at The Secret Acre, since enjoying the first produce of spring, punctuated by the sadness of having to say goodbye to a beloved elderly member of the family.
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And we say, it’s all right.
Despite the Climate Change driven drought, summer abundance arrived at The Secret Acre.
It all made for a busy July and August, along with the usual influx of willing helpers at the start of the school holidays.
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Here’s a quick pictorial catch up of how it’s going on The Secret Acre Veg Patch after our unexpected slow start to the year.
Overall, things have caught up pretty well considering our chaotic spring, and garlic, field beans, salads, strawberries and red currents are all ready to start to harvest.
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Last year we created an asparagus bed by the greenhouse, planted up with a mixture of purchased crowns, as well as some plants grown from seed by Emma the year before in preparation.
As the RHS advises, new asparagus plants take a couple of years to settle in before you can start harvesting, so patience is required initially.
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Last year we wrote about our Field Bean Experiment.
Inspired by results from Garden Organic, we allowed a section of our Green Manure Field Beans to grow on as an edible alternative to Broad Beans, and also to seed save for replanting this year.
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Despite our usual New Year optimism for the gardening year ahead, an unexpected combination of care duties, hospital treatment and Covid, meant that we are having a very slow start to our spring at The Secret Acre.
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January tends to get a bad rap as a month.
We blame Pilot for letting the rot set in when they sang in their 1975 No1 hit single “January, sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me”.
But as Josephine Nuese, author of The Country Garden pointed out, gardening really begins in January, with the dream. So come last year’s cold snap, or this year’s unseasonably mild weather, we kind of quite like January here at The Secret Acre.
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As the September harvest with its late summer sunshine gave away to increasingly damp and cool autumnal weather, we gathered in the last of the crops at The Secret Acre and started clearing down the veg beds.
Here are a few pictures from October and early November’s gradual decent into autumn.
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The Secret Acre 