Snapdragon's garden

Gladioli plum tart

The gladioli that I planted this year have begun to bloom.
Last year was a bit of a disaster with gladioli - though I planted 6 different colours, they all bloomed peach - but this year the supplier seems to be back on track.

Gladioli are a one of those flowers that used to be regarded as tasteless -Dame Edna Everage etc. but with the increased interest in late summer flowers in velvety hues they are back in the garden and in the vase.

Most of the gladioli that I grow are dark saturated colours - this is "plum tart", another good one is "black jack", more dark red than purple with fringed petals.  This year I am also trying out a pale lavender and white to mix with the sunflowers and fennel.

When picking gladioli for the house there are 2 things to remember.  Firstly always keep the stem upright - otherwise the tip will bend over to the vertical - this can actually look very good if it is slight, less so if you have laid the flower down in a trug and have a right angle at the top of the stem.
Secondly, gladioli struggle to open all their flowers in the vase - they just don't have enough energy - always use flower food but add in an extra pinch of sugar to give them a bit of a boost and they will continue blooming right to the top.  A pinch mind, not a spoonful or the water turns green.

Over at Snapdragon's Chat we are still discussing British flowers and I have found a small grower in Northamptonshire called Foxtail Lilly.  Excellent.

Pig

Last Wednesday we had the biggest disaster yet  in our attempts to grow our own food.

In July we acquired two Oxford Sandy and Black weaners to fatten up - they lived in the rough field and as well as being destined for the freezer they were meant to be clearing the land so that it can be planted over the winter.

The heavy rain that we have had made the soil boggy and caused a mini landslip at the far away fence line - the pigs were able to dig a hole under the fence and escaped, setting out on a jaunt over our 3 of our neighbours fields, ending up in a field of cows and calves.  They must have been irritating the cows and were attacked, one being kicked to death, the other fleeing home to the safety of his home.

I have not been able to write about this until today - it has been such a shock - we knew that we might have problem with the pigs escaping, everybody with pigs has tales of trying to re-capture them, but I envisaged this in terms of trying to herd them out of the cutting garden, not of them being killed by other farm animals.
The remaining pig stays close to the gate now - we have surrounded him with an electric fence so that he can't get to the fence line - and I just feel incredibly guilty at the waste.

Over on Snapdragon's Chat we are discussing Buying British cut flowers and the Gardeners' World programme.

Doing the flowers for the wedding of the year

Well my year that is.  This weekend my "little" brother got married to his fiancee Helen - The little has to be in inverted commas as, despite the fact that he is 5 years younger than me, he has been taller than me since he was 8.

It was a really lovely wedding day - the sun shone, the bride looked radiant, the bridegroom proud and lucky (as he is), the church service was moving, the bridesmaids angelic and the party afterwards great fun.

Helen is a nursery nurse, children are at the centre of her life and it was a gloriously happy wedding thronged with children from 5 days old upwards, everyone under 13 and over 30 whooped it up on the dance floor while those too cool to dance lingered outside drinking under the stars.

Stephen and Helen just married (and about time too)

Helen wishing that she hadn't had quite so many bridesmaids and that they hadn't made quite so much confetti.

Katie with the confetti - trying to prolong the fun be seeing how many times you can throw it.

Zoe and me outside the church .

Honesty

Now is the time to harvest honesty seedpods if you want to use the mother-of-pearl insides of the seedcases.

We grow a lot of honesty - if looks great in bunches with late flowering tulips - and we leave it to form seedheads.  Then we spend evenings shelling the seedpods, and make decorations from the shiny bits.

My favourite decorations are heart shaped hangings - these look wonderful hanging in windows with low winter sunshine streaming through them.  They also look good on Christmas trees - either traditional evergreen ones, or on branches of cut birch or alder.  They look particularly good on silver birch as their colour picks up on the colour of the bark.

These sold out last year as I can only make a limited number - they will be going up on the website when I rejig it for Autumn in a fortnights time,

Over on Snapdragon's chat we are talking about family businesses - why not pop in and have your say.

Scrubbing up a bit

My brother's wedding in on Saturday and I looked in the mirror at the end of last week and decided that I was really far too split endy and snaggle browed to be seen in public and should do something about it.

I still hadn't got an outfit sorted either so I arranged to go into town yesterday afternoon and get me hair cut and brows "reshaped" so that I seem a bit more civilized on Stephen's "big day".
I should really have done it sooner as the photographer for the article in The Independent magazine was here in the morning - he was a delight, he turned out to be a friend of a friend of a friend and for once the sun was shining.
I still don't know when the article will be published, it was scheduled for September but the photos seemed to be rather urgent so perhaps it will be this Saturday.
We now seem to be well into Autumn colours now - this is a bunch of flowers delivered up to Strathblane yesterday morning, they almost glowed.                                                         
   Over on Snapdragon's chat we are talking about family businesses - the benefits and drawbacks.

Leaving it be . . .

One of the core precepts of gardening in an organic way is to watch and learn from nature.

When there is not a spray-able solution to problems you have to make decisions based on experience, an experience that comes from observation.

The plant in the photo is Artemesia "Powis Castle", one of several artemesias I grow for their silvery foliage and woodsy musty smell.  It is a plant I use a lot in September and October, lightening arrangements of dark dahlias, seed-heads and berries.

Every year from March, as soon as the weather heats up, it is covered in long ugly strings of black-fly - they cling to the stems and getting them off by hand damages the delicate foliage.  If I want to pick artemesia early in the season I have to float the stems in water with a squirt of washing up liquid in it until the aphids float off.

Over the years I have noticed that the black flies do not seem to damage the plants - there is a virus risk, but their sap sucking activities don't seem to effect the vigour of the plants.  I have also noticed that the problem seems to clear up towards the end of the year.

Now I know why - a flotilla of ladybirds have worked their way from one end of the row to the other, they have only 4 plants to go now, and then the black fly will be completely gone.

Complete non-intervention - labour free pest control - suits me.

The bottom photo shows my girls working as labourers, nailing down reclaimed rafters to make the shed floor.
J
x

Herby

Last week when a journalist asked me what my favourite flowers were I had to split my list into 2.
In one part were the show stoppers, the glamour girls like parrot tulips and oriental poppies, but in the other part were the plants that I use in everything, the ones I quite literally couldn't do without.

And top of the list were herbs - apple-mint, which I begin cutting as soon as it is 8 inches for mixing with late tulips and alliums and which then develops these slightly fluffy suedey looking flowers in August.

At the moment I goes into practically every bunch.

And then there is fennel - both plain green and bronze, which form great zig-zagging stems topped with lime green see through umbels of flowers - bronze fennel punctuated with a mix of dark red and orange dahlias and some zingy salvia patens is my favourite bouquet of the moment.

I think that I like these herby foliages so much because they add a greeny scent to the bouquet - their scent isn't sweet or cloying like some flowers, you aren't aware of it as you pass the bouquet, it doesn't pump itself out.

Instead it quietly perfumes the house. 
At the moment we have Timmy the Jack Russell, staying with us for his holidays. Now he is a lovely dog, but he is also an old dog and the house was beginning to smell rather doggyish.  I have picked some sprigs of applemint and put them in a stone bottle in the hall and they make the entrance quite minty fresh.
Next weekend my brother marries his fiancee Helen, and I am arranging the flowers - I want to create a green scented church for them with fennel, mint and feverfew as a scented background for the sweetpeas to sing out against.

Hearts and flowers

Much to Euan's disgust the house has been filled for the past 2 weeks with Christmas prototypes.

I have tried to gather them all up when he comes into a room but it hasn't really worked.  The weather doesn't help of course - we do seem to have skipped summer altogether and sewing up stockings while watching the rain lash down the window panes seems right somehow.

The decorations that I make - stockings aside - tend not to be that Christmassy anyway, many get left up long after the festive season.

The photo is of a hanging heart in navy gingham with dried hydrangea decoration.

They have been hanging in the hall on our vase of larch branches for a few days now.

We are chatting about what is vintage over on Snapdragon's chat - why not pop over and post your point of view

Successes - Delphiniums

It has been dry today but cold - as I type this the geese are honking their way overhead, we are going to light the woodburning stove, and it feels like October.
It feels like it is the time of year when I look back and take stock of what worked and what didn't in the cutting garden.
However it isn't Autumn yet, and I for one am crossing my fingers for the mythical Indian Summer and a hot September.
Iam taking the chance to revel in the crop that has enjoyed the cool wet summer - our delphiniums.
The delphiniums went into the ground as seedlings last May and I took all their flower buds off to give them a chance to develop.
This year they have been flowering since late May and have worked as a cut and come again crop. As long as they are cut or dead-headed and prevented from making seed they seem to keep on throwing up new blooms.
It was a mix of Magic Fountain delphiniums and there are good whites and dark blues and a heartstoppingly elegant greyish mauve.
I hope that this mega flowering isn't some kind of swan song.
The flowers that don't get cut for customers are dismembered to dry and add as a bit of colour into our garden pot pourri which goes on sale in October. 

The garden in August

This is a picture of the garden taken at 8 this morning looking towards the house from the chicken run.  You can't see the rain fortunately.
This is the time of year that I like the garden best - suddenly there seems to be so much substance to it - great fat dahlia plants magic out flowers day upon day, sunflowers begin to reach up above their canes and the sweet-peas outgrow their support.  You can almost smell the plants growing.
It is also the most fragile time of the year - straight down rain is fine but add in a wind and the great sails of leaves are likely to snap, taking stems with them, no amount of staking will save them.
We have planted hedges as windbreaks for the long term but until then we shall have to cross our fingers.