June in review

June is a month of two halves. We start still in spring – I didn’t get around to planting out most of my veg and cut flowers until the first weekend of the month – and finish it most definitely in summer. The allotment finally starts to get productive and the garden goes from politeness to an overgrown sprawl. The long, long days are bookmarked with short sleepless nights (at least they are if you’re a sleep-thief 4 year old), but thankfully we can take it. It’s a month of high energy before we get zapped by the heavy weather of July and August. It’s also the start of event season (I’m working or have worked on three outdoor arts events this month) and I find myself back in the familiar-yet-unfamiliar life of print deadlines, venue dressing and production plans.

I’m not cooking so much at the moment, so there’s real joy when someone else does. This cake table taken in Bushley for the jubilee is a case in point: joy, in cake form. Back home we did manage a little tea, with a little help from our corgi friends at M&S.

Few things are more enjoyable than a cake table in a village hall
Our humble jubilee tea

May ended at Chelsea Flower Show, which didn’t have the fireworks of previous years. The designs were markedly low impact (I don’t mean that in a bad way), naturalistic, loose, even a bit wild. It’s the kind of designs that look really easy to do but are of course nigh-on impossible to pull off. But I love the toned down shades, the purples, greens, deep dusky pinks, subtle yellows and whites.

Rewilding garden at Chelsea Flower Show
Loose planting of poppies and verbascum at Chelsea

A few weeks later I headed to Hidcote, possibly my favourite place on earth, to soak in the glory of an arts and crafts garden in midsummer. Harry came along and to explore this garden maze through his eyes is a fresh joy.

Slightly tighter, but still loose, and note the colour spectrum – midsummer at Hidcote
Love these 8 foot tall scabious
Pale yellow with bubblegum pink
A field of daisies never grows old

Down on the allotment, we started cropping lupins, alliums and sweet rocket back in late May. The allium christophii is both whopper and winner; some I’m cutting now for the vase and others I’ll dry ready for winter. The lupins are dropping now, but stepping into their place are the dahlias, the first of which are just opening now. There’s filler plants this year too, from cerinthe, ammi and a surprise crop of gypshopila, with its white elegance. It’s still too early for much veg, though we do have broad beans cropping now and the start of the soft fruit (strawberries, redcurrants, black currants). I’ll have a poke about the potatoes later this week…it’s always a surprise to me just how long one has to wait for a veg harvest.

Allotment on 4 June – self-sown poppies, lupins and the beans bedding in
Early June potatoes and still lots of bare earth
By 21 June, the broad beans are fat and the strawberries cropping, though it will still be some weeks before we reach full ‘fatness’
Of course, the healthiest thing is this thicket of flowering brambles
At home, the peas are threatening to creep into the sun room
Giant allium christophii, sweet william, foxglove and cerinthe
Cropping in June – sweet williams, sweet peas and sweet rocket

An hour down the road it’s a different story, and I come home from Worcestershire with a basket of raspberries and beetroot from my parents’ patch. Earlier this month I took my Dad foraging for elderflowers down lanes I never knew existed, and we now have three hefty bottles of cordial. (Store them in the freezer and there’s no risk of mould forming.)

Our strawberries, alongside Mum’s raspberries, broadbeans and beets
After an afternoon’s foraging on jubilee weekend we have bottles of cordial

It’s in July that things start to get serious: I’ve high hopes for the dahlias this year, having spent a small fortune on new plants, and that’s before we even get onto the chrysanthemums, gladioli, cornflower, courgette, squash, borlotti, French beans, kales, chard, peas… I can see the summer in sight.

Also this month:
Allotment: Planted out most plants first weekend of June, including dahlias and beans. Started off biennials. Tons of strimming and weeding and staking, at home AND allotment…
Harvesting: Strawberries, broad beans, oregano, sweet william, alliums, sweet peas, foxglove, cerinthe, first ammi, last lupins.
Cooking and eating: Fish finger tacos, meringues with homegrown strawberries, chocolate chip cookies, roast apricots, raspberries and blueberries with yoghurt, plenty of rose, bulgur wheat with broad beans and feta, birthday cake
Also: Chelsea Flower Show, Hidcote, Key to the City (Birmingham), Tappin’ In (Birmingham), What’s in Store (Bearwood), play dates and park visits.

Sowing the seeds of…hardy annuals actually

Easter heralded a well earned rest and a fair few proper feeds. Brilliant. Chappers popped round with some HUGE eggs from her chickens – so big that the egg box had to be strapped shut with an elastic band. I’d choose these over chocolate eggs any day.

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Chappers and her monster eggs

Grampy’s crysanths have been showing definite signs of life and so off they went to Worcestershire for my mum to take cuttings. This is a far safer option than me trying to do it: firstly, I don’t know what to do, and secondly, these little plants wouldn’t stand a chance with Gertrude the Destroyer around. We now have about 50 cuttings on the go and let’s hope some of them root. Though perhaps not all…that would be ALOT of flowers.

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Grampy’s crystanth cuttings

With the growing season begun I’ve finally started to plan this year’s plot. The challenge for 2016 is making room for all the flowers – not simply the crysanths, but the armfuls of cut flowers that I’m hoping to grow throughout the summer and into autumn. The sunflowers and sweetpeas demand their own section, but the remainder will be strewn amidst the vegetables: I like this pick-and-mix approach.

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Plans for this year’s planting are coming together…

So with the plan freshly drawn, I got down to sowing this year’s hardy annuals. There is greater variety and more colour than last year, but this is all a gesture of hope over experience…Who knows if they will actually grow? We have hot pink cosmos to sit next to the purple shades of zinnia and rudbeckia, softened with white love-in-a-mist and jewelled cornflowers. There are orange nasturtium, blue borage and garish red marigolds, plus the elegant long stems of verbena and ammi to attract the bees and butterflies.

Time to start sowing the hardy annuals

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Marigold seeds look like desiccated worms…

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…whilst nasturtium seeds are like shrivelled brains

The first problem has presented itself: there is no-where for the seed trays to go. We’re already at peak windowsill usage, and I’ve barely even started on this year’s sowing. So they sit on the kitchen table until I come up with a solution. Reader, we need a bigger house.

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It’s the time of year when the kitchen table is full of seed trays

Allotment: Forked over patch by shed, planted out broad beans and A/W lettuce under cloches. Moved spinach/kale/lettuce seedlings to greenhouse.

Sowed: Borage, Rudbeckia Cherry Brandy, Verbena Boneriensis, Zinnia mix, Cosmos Dazzler, Nasturtium Alaska, Cornflower mix, Nigella double white, Calendula mix, Viola