Where did the last couple of months go? One minute I was blogging away fairly frequently about the garden and suddenly here we are and I have said nothing for weeks.
The garden is slowly returning to its usual state of semi-wildness as opposed to the total overgrown mess it was when I got back from my long walk. One of the problems with a naturalistic garden, full of self sown seedlings and every thing jostling for position, is that it easily tips over into chaos. Three weeks of neglect had left it so overgrown it made me want to cry. Now a week of hours of cutting back, weeding, taking out some of the thousands of opium poppies threatening to drown out everything else in the new bed, has just about returned it to something which looks as if it is meant. Not great, not perfect, but in the loosest sense a garden rather than a mess.
I must must must remember next year that the oriental poppies and the foxgloves need staking. Every year I am seduced by how sturdy they look in May and every year we get a ferocious wind slicing along the valley which leaves everything tipsy and twisted. I have also cut back the huge amounts of growth on the poppies as the flowering finishes and am left with a lot of bare soil and mess. I am wondering about zinnias or more cosmos. I suspect zinnias would be better. next year I should try growing some from seed.
to do:
Sow more lettuce and other salad stuff - done
Sow more carrots and beetroot - done
Finish cutting back poppies - done
Weed poppy bed - started
Plant annual succession (??)
Move heuchera
Move marguerites - done
Weed behind new bed
Mulch path with wood chippings
Tie up sweet peas -done
Weed side bed - started
Dig up lavender - done
Aargh
so much to do
This is a garden diary, for myself, to keep track of the flowers, fruit and vegetables which grow up here on the hill
