It has been a while since I wrote anything here, things have been pretty hectic in the walled garden, getting ready for the open gardens.
After deep consideration we decided to do open gardens for the NGS, only 3 gardens in the village opened in the end, two large and one small where we did timed tickets to make it safe.
By the end of Sunday we had around 250 visitors to our walled garden, about half of our normal numbers but worth doing to raise funds for the NGS medical charities.
The weather this year has been odd and unpredictable but has resulted in many plants open in the garden which may not have been previously, so great for returning visitors.
No April showers this year but very cold and dry. Along come May and with it the rain. Here in the walled garden 25 days in April had night time temperatures below 4 degrees (freezing). We had only 13.3mm rain in April, half that of 2020, 9mm of that came in one day. Then in May we had 64.76mm rain (17.27mm in one day, 13th)
Temperatures only started rising the last few days of May and now in June it is so hot.
All this has caused much confusion for the plants. Growing seeds in the unheated greenhouse they did not know what to do and very slow or non-existent germination for many of the seeds we were trying to grow.
The plus side of this unusual weather is that plants, usually already flowered and going over were only just beginning so the garden had a different look for the visitors. The Iris was typical of this, showing their full colours.
In the front garden we have some paeonies, the oldest is almost white, very large blooms and usually petals are falling by now but….
We also have a big patch of Alliums which by open gardens will have become the brown seed heads. I have planted some Salvia Ostfriesland in between to take over when the alliums die.
This year the alliums were still purple for open gardens.
Unfortunately the same could not be said for the edibles, the first, covered strawberries were ready for picking but most vegetable seeds sown this year are struggling, hopefully they will get a move on now the weather is much warmer day and night and so we shall have a good harvest, eventually.
That’s gardening for you, unpredictable, rewarding and always something different!
