A rare weekend with no daytime plans meant we could spend both days in the garden and make some noticeable progress. Our first focus was to harvest most of our soft fruit before the wasps destroyed everything. Our wasp traps have been very successful in catching loads of them – and after we noticed that we’d lost all the fruit on one of our pear trees to wasps or birds, we hung a couple more in the orchard. We must be making a serious dent in the wasp population now, and yet they still come!! Harvesting the gooseberries has helped though as there’s less to attract them – although I have ended up with arms ripped to pieces in the process!
John also harvested our first potatoes, which is really exciting since I managed to accidentally kill most of our plants last year with weedkiller. It looks like we’re going to have a good crop – and being more thoughtful in how we planted the potatoes by planting the earlies next to the squash bed means we have more space now for the pumpkins and squashes to grow. And we took down our broad bean plants – I’d hoped by removing most of the infected leaves we could keep the plants long enough for the beans to grow properly but no such luck. A very disappointing harvest this year.
Most of our vegetable seedlings have spent ages in their modules in the greenhouse so we made a concerted effort to plant out as many of these as we could. We planted out our brussels sprouts and some of the chard, and then started on the leftover seedlings that we didn’t have space for in their designated space – kohlrabi, celeriac, and kale. We still have some cabbage and broccoli seedlings to go out if we can find space! On the flowers front – I put out a few more sunflowers, as well as the rest of the carnations and one set of cosmos. I’d expected to have built our new flower bed in our back garden by now and so sowed seeds to fill it. As we haven’t had time for that, I’m trying to find other places to plant them all, which is proving slightly challenging!!
And, inspired by a visit to friends who live on the opposite side of the valley to us, I started potting up our chilli seedlings ready to go into our new greenhouse when we finally get round to putting it up. Perhaps a summer project…
We seem to have spent most of our free time watering this week – much like most of the country I imagine! It’s so hard keeping things alive in this heat, especially when you’ve just planted them. We’re also conscious of not disturbing our guests so the farmhouse gardens are looking particularly sorry for themselves. John manages to get some watering in if they go out, but it’s not easy. We’re very lucky that we have a well to provide most of our water, although that’s drying up now and takes a few days to refill. The fields are looking very brown around here too, with the farmers harvesting what they can. We watched one farmer harvesting barley on one of our evening walks – very impressive the way they had a truck alongside the tractor to catch the grain, and then how a second truck switched in when the first was full, with no pause whatsoever!! The deer and its fawn that sprang past the gate twice, and the hare that followed, was icing on the cake!
We bought new fans for the farmhouse bedrooms this week as they can get really warm– especially the top floor bedrooms which are super-insulated since we redid them. We’re finding the same in our house though – the insulation is great to keep the heat in over winter, but also retains the heat in the summer, so once the rooms warm up it’s hard to cool them down again. We’re really glad that the council insisted on us having proper wooden doors – even though they’re starting to crack in this heat and will need repainting soon, we wouldn’t have gone for stable doors that means we can open the top half and get a bit of a draught through the house.
We’ve had two more lovely reviews from our last couple of guests, which is really encouraging. We put so much effort into making the house and their holiday special, so it’s great to hear how well it’s received. One of these guests has also booked again for next year – our first repeat booking!! We’re looking forward to welcoming them back :)
Ley Farm Cottages 