Four days of gardening and Jubilee celebrations! 

After weeks and weeks of feeling behind with our job list, the extra two bank holidays (and mostly decent weather) gave us a chance to catch up. The last month of sun and rain means – like everyone’s – our garden has exploded with vegetation! Shrubs needing to be cut back, the grass growing so fast you can almost see it, and weeds everywhere. We started off the weekend with an extensive list of jobs each day – mostly outdoors (and a few indoor ones in case of very bad weather) – and actually made it through about three quarters of the list! Unsurprisingly, the worst jobs are still to be crossed off – but it feels like a very successful weekend nonetheless. 

The work John’s done in our wood has paid off – the moss has all gone, and the grass seed germinated really nicely. Timing was pretty perfect with the wet week we’ve had (which was lucky as he managed to drain the well twice with all the watering!) and it now looks beautiful and green. 

Our various vegetable beds are mostly growing well, and we’ve spent a lot of time planting out seedlings; staking the tomatoes, cucumbers and melons; and putting the next load of seeds in to keep a constant supply of summer crops. We’ve had our fair share of problems too though – our rhubarb plot looks very sorry for itself, and we’ve lost four rounds of beetroot seedlings to mice (we’ve now reverted to cut-up plastic bottles to protect them so keeping our fingers crossed). We’ve also found mouse damage to the redcurrant bush in our fruit cage (irritatingly stripping the berries off and just leaving them strewn around!) – so after reading up about mint and marigolds being good mouse deterrents, we sprinkled marigold seeds around the base and covered the area with mint leaves. Let’s hope it’s not an old wives tale!! 

A lot of our squash and pumpkin plants have died – seemingly of a fungal infection – which we think was because it took us longer to finish building our new vegetable bed than expected, and so they were overcrowded in the conservatory waiting to be planted out. Interestingly – the plants that have died were from seed packets, whereas the plants we grew from seeds we kept from the pumpkins and crown prince squashes we grew & ate last year seem to have survived. We’ll definitely be keeping more seeds again this year, to see if we can become more self-sufficient – our crown prince was originally a Christmas gift from some of our lovely neighbours when we’d first moved in, so it would be amazing to keep that going for a third year!

On the plus side – our runner beans are mostly surviving slug attacks and growing well; our potatoes are growing so fast we had to cover them twice this weekend (!); our strawberry drainpipes are working pretty well; and our artichoke seeds grew so well we’ve potted up six artichoke/stock pots around the garden. We’ve also run out of space for our onion seeds, so are attempting to grow them in pots in the greenhouse instead. And our (first) new vegetable bed is completely full of strawberries and blackberries, sweetcorn, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, onions and shallots, broad beans, courgette and nasturtium – with our cold frame acting as the staging for lettuce ready to fill the gaps in the main beds.

One thing that has surprised us is our Madagascan jasmine in our conservatory. When we moved in, it was beautiful and luscious (first photo) – but after leaving the conservatory locked up over the hottest weekend last July, it (and everything else we left in there) frazzled to a crisp (second photo). We thought we’d killed it – but with a bit of TLC and a lot of patience, it seems to have come back to life (third photo)!! We gave it a severe pruning this weekend to clear the dead branches and retrain the tendrils along the wires, so hopefully now it’ll bush out too. A few flowers have started appearing, so we’re hoping we’ll be able to enjoy the gorgeous scent next year before the build is done and we move out and leave this for our guests. 

An unexpected success was creating our overflow vegetable bed! Some of our seeds grew far better than we expected them to, and so we needed to find somewhere to plant them. We have various drainage channels around and across the property as we get a lot of water flowing off the hills, and along one such channel we’ve had a large bed of weeds (and a gunnera that occasionally appears). We decided to dig up the weeds and use the area for more useful purposes – and were amazed to uncover a semi-collapsed stone wall around the edge. Now the weeds have gone, you can clearly see a purpose-built flower bed – perfect for our extra veg! 

While I was busying myself in the greenhouse, John took on a pretty rubbish job that’s made such a difference again. When we moved in, our courtyard was completely covered with moss and weeds, and gradually he’s been pressure washing and clearing it a bit at a time. The build-up of soil and weeds causes a real problem with blocking our drains and has caused flooding before, so it’s an important job to keep on top of. He spent an entire day clearing the edges – strimming the weeds down, and leaf-blowing everything into piles before carting it away to the bonfire pile. He then pressure-washed the soil away and scraped the moss up, getting absolutely covered in the process. Lucky that was on the sunnier day! 

One thing we’ve been quite bad with recently is taking a bit of time out to enjoy where we live (especially in daylight hours) – really only doing this when we’ve had visitors. The various Jubilee celebrations meant we had a good excuse to stop working and experience village life – and we’ve met so many people as a result! We visited Stockland Fair on Saturday (Stockland is the village next to us and actually closer than our own village centre) – which was a fab day out with entertainment like ferret racing, old tractors on display, and lots of stalls and food. And then on Sunday we had our Yarcombe village jubilee street party – held in our village hall because of the rain – which was completely packed and with a fabulous feast of bring-a-plate goodies. A lovely way to end a busy four days!