We don’t know about you, but for us it seems to be a bonanza year for broad beans.
Our over-wintered crop, which in past years has struggled to get past knee height, suddenly shot up during May to waist level monsters.
Our first attempt at a spring compost dressing might have helped, as no doubt has the good spring weather. Continue reading
The strange feeling of ‘veg bed competence’ we had at the start of May has somehow survived through to end of the month.
Surely it can’t last!
The greenhouse seedlings (pictured left) rapidly turned into a veritable garden nursery vision of plug plants demanding to be planted out against the risks of any late frosts. Continue reading
Thanks to the mid-spring Easter sunshine, it almost feels like we are on track with our planting plans this year.
Already Emma’s seeds in the greenhouse are shooting up.
We arrived back at The Secret Acre after Christmas away to find that Santa had delivered a ‘mystery tool’. It was actually a double mystery.
Santa’s Elves had failed to include a note, so we didn’t know who the gift was from. We quickly guessed it was from our friend Derek, he of the Cider Motion Picture and the Boot Rack, as he has past form in the giving of mystery garden tools, which turn out to be fantastically useful, thanks to his own veg growing experience. Continue reading
The mad rush to catch up in the garden at the end of May was immediately followed by the mad rush in early June to catch the Elderflower at its sunny best.
After this year’s whopping 4kg of wild garlic pesto making, we made Continue reading
We made the rookie mistake of going on holiday in May.
So after congratulating ourselves for getting off to a good start in April, we came back to a mad frenzy of overdue planting jobs at the end of the month to try and catch up all over again. Continue reading
The signs of Spring are breaking out everywhere, and our over-wintering veg patch is no exception.
Just as we feared all hope for the late summer plantings of Broccoli and Cauliflower might be fading, the lengthening days worked their magic. Continue reading
Spring might officially still be a while off, but the first stirrings of new hope ahead are already in the gardener’s heart.
There’s the new, rotated veg patch plan to draw up, and seeds to be sorted and ordered. Continue reading
“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself” – May Sarton.
Personally I like to think my life so far has fortunately been a series of triumphs set against a few disasters. But the jury is definitely still out when it comes to our new veg beds!
Certainly in this first year, there have been more triumphs than losses, which is nice. But this is probably mostly because we are still easily pleased! Continue reading
And another year goes by. So last month I put up two curtain poles and a washing line at The Secret Acre. Because October marked our first year anniversary of moving in. And rather embarrassingly these were the last of the ‘quick’ jobs still undone from that very first month!
But missing curtain poles aside, October was a chance for us to reflect on the good and bad points of our first year. Fortunately, perhaps, our positives and negatives were remarkably similar. Continue reading
