We had a day away from the job list on Saturday as we celebrated John’s birthday – with a 15 mile ‘pub crawl’ (aka pub hike) around some of our local pubs (his choice!). John organises a walk every 3-4 months with friends from the surrounding villages and this was our summer one, although the intended 20 mile route raised a few eyebrows! Given the heat we all decided to cut out the fourth pub and head straight to the final one – which was one of the best decisions we made that day! It was a lovely day getting out and about and supporting our local pubs – we’re especially grateful to the Yarcombe Inn for opening an hour earlier for us, and to the Flintlock Inn for opening especially for us! Our guests (a friend from work and her family) joined us for the first two pubs – it was so lovely to be able to show them around the hills, and great for Evie to have other dogs to play with!
With an-ever extending gardening list, we spent Sunday working through various jobs. We moved all our tomato plants off our newly bricked area behind the greenhouse and started planting them into larger pots and moving them to the bottom of the orchard where we have more space. We got about a third of the way through before running out of compost and bamboo canes – we have a stash of longer canes that can be chopped up but didn’t want to do that until we’d used what we needed for the runner bean frame. So our next job was to put up the runner bean frame! Although we then ran out of soil and compost so only planted out half of the bean seedlings. We’ll need to dig out a bit of the bank in the orchard this week to fill the rest of the bags.
We potted up half of the cucumber plants which were loving the heat in the greenhouse and had started growing like crazy – only stopping when we ran out of space for the larger pots. We’d fully intended to have our new greenhouse built in our garden by this point so need to think a little more creatively about how we use the space we have. For the first year the cucumbers actually look like they might grow fruit so need to maximise this opportunity! And we netted our gooseberry bushes, after finding a group of blackbirds helping themselves yesterday! Of course, the first thing I then saw was a blackbird hopping through a small gap under the netting, so as soon as they’d disappeared I closed that gap! If only we had more space in our fruit cage…
Ley Farm Cottages 