This Year in the Garden

My garden at the moment is a complete mess - the result of a mixture of being really busy and the strange variation in weather that we’ve been having recently. One minute it’s too hot to be out in the sun for more than 10 minutes and the next it’s rained so heavily that half of my flowers are knocked sideways and weeds have appeared pretty much everywhere. I’ve been re-doing the top part of my garden for the last few months and as a result the other half has been a bit neglected. I can’t really complain though as, for a small garden, it has produced a huge number of flowers this year, many of which I have been able to use in bouquets and gifts.

This year I reduced the number of annuals from last year, using my three new raised beds. The new beds have helped a huge amount as it’s meant rather than staking each individual plant, I’ve been able to put netting the whole way across the bed to keep everything upright. Fewer annuals also means much less watering and I’ve been spending more time thinking about my perennial bed and how I can incorporate more plants that, as well as being good for cutting, also fit in with my cottage garden planting style.

A few annuals that have done particularly well this year are, my strawflowers which have just kept flowering and that I now have hanging upside down in my house to dry. You’ll see me using these in wreaths this Christmas. The Nigella have also been great and have added a muted blue tone to some of my designs. Again, the seed heads of these are perfect for drying. I sowed two batches of Sweet Pea this year, one in October and one in February as a bit of an experiment. The October sown sweet peas ended up doing much, much better than the Feb ones and they both pretty much stopped flowering at the same time. In the end, they were producing flowers quicker than I could cut them. As always there have been a fair few disappointments and a number of flowers have been completely destroyed by aphids including my Ammi . My gardener neighbour informs me that the aphids have been particularly bad this year so I’m glad it’s not just me.

This is only my second year of growing cut flowers and it’s all a bit of a learning curve. I think I’ll try and start off a few more annuals in the autumn this year so that I get a few more early spring flowers next year. It’s difficult to keep a constant supply of flowers available and at the moment I have a lot of flowers in the middle of the season but not very many either side. This year has also been a strange one because the temperature really didn’t start to warm up until much later than usual, meaning that everything was behind - I know many flower growers in the UK faced the same problem.

Now it’s almost time to start my favourite part- choosing the seeds I want to use for next year!