Hampton Court Flower Show

What seems like a lifetime ago, Sam and I went to Hampton Court Palace Flower show on 8 July. I have never been to a flower show before so I was pretty excited to find out what all the fuss was about (and empty my purse on all those must haves I was bound to find).
I did  work at the flower show a couple of times in my student days when I worked out of a sandwich van, so I had some idea of what it might look like but I had no idea of the size. I booked us full day tickets but after Sam's usual flapping about, we missed a good few hours and had to rush around a bit to see everything we wanted to.
We chose to buy tickets on the Sunday because we knew it would be the plant sell-off and therefore there might be some bargains to be had that fitted in with our next-to-nothing budget. After paying £10 (yes that's £10) to park the car, we trugded through the mud to get to the ground. It was not a good day to discover that my wellies have a leak - but luckily, despite the torrential rain of the morning, the sun came out to greet us as we arrived.

We wandered around the show gardens, surprised by how small they were compared to what they look like on tv, I particularly liked the This is Me garden by James Callicott. It was a garden about dyslexia but it somehow reminded me of the secret garden or the type of place you could imagine getting lost in and having adventures as a child. The other garden that particularly interested me was the urban garden designed sround the London riots last summer, to me it was about the way that beauty can grow out of the most disaterous or unfriendly environments. I particularly liked the bench made from double yellow lines which had lifted up from the road and curved around a tree.

I also like the use of wild flowers that you would often see in urban environments. However, although it was nice to waner around these gardens, they are often not really the kind of thing you could emulate in your own garden at home. I am also more keen on growing things that I can eat than just things to look at. This was one area I was slightly disappointed with at Hampton Court. There was an edible plants marquee but it was rather small with a lot of fruit tree/bush stalls and not much in the way of the unusual veg I like to hunt down. We did manage to get a kaffir lime plant - Sam loves cooking Thai and asian food so to have our own supply of freah kaffir lime leaves is pretty exciting - and hopefully money saving in the long run. I also managed to get so vegetables from one of the stands as they were clearing away and a couple of plants (tomatoes and chard) which have replaced some of my own plants that haven't done quite so well.

The floral marquee was really the place to be though, bright colours and heady scents were everywhere and every turn of the head provided us with something else to look at. Seeing plants at their best really does make me understand why some people prefer these forms to edible plants (I'm still firmly in the edible camp though!). I particularly liked the Waitrose stand which conbined fruit and vegetables with flowers to create stunning dispalys. We were able to pick up lots of plants at end end of the day during the sell off - dhalias from the national collection, alliums, lillies and roses from the displays as cutting flowers and lots of nursery plants from as little as 50p each. I think the best way to demonstrate the things we saw is for you to take a look at the pictures so here are some of the stunning plants we saw:



Delphiniums



Dhalias

Topiary creatures





Lillies and a cottage garden display above

Drought?

So apart from five days of actual summer about three weeks ago when it was hot and dry, this has pretty much been the wettest drought ever. I was very pleased with myself that my water butt was full and I even ordered two more through a deal with the water company before the drought kicked in (although they didn't arrive for over a month and missed most of the wettest weather). However, it seems that just by announcing a drought, mother nature decided to show us all who's boss and make it do nothing but rain for weeks on end. As you can see from this photo, I have had to become an all-weather gardener/photographer, this was taken on a particularly foul day. I know it looks like night time but it was actually the afternoon. The garden seemed to respond well to all the water for a little while with everything shooting up and looking lush and green. Fast-forward a few weeks and the weeds are overtaking the veg, seedlings have rotted off and the onions are forming flower buds which I am picking off to stop the plants putting all their energy into forming flowers instead of swelling the bulbs. Gardening has become a game of cat and mouse where I dash outside and get as many jobs done as possible before the next rain cloud sheds its load over my garden.
I hope the drought conditions are called off soon, despite all this rain I have had a taster of watering the garden using watering cans and it is hard work. The water butt also empties out much faster than the time it takes to fill so I'm not sure how we would have coped in a long, hot, dry summer. Last year, to save on our water bill, we saved shower water in the bath and used it to water the garden - so we are well prepared with water saving if the drought ever does turn up. What are your experiences of the drought so far?

First Broad Bean Harvest

I don't know about you, but I am a pretty impatient gardener. I plant something and then obsessively check it on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis to see whether it is growing, producing a crop or flowering. So it was a rather pleasant surprise when my first broad bean crop of the season kind of snuck up on me. I would throw them a cursory glance and note that they were getting taller (but not nearly as tall as Monty Don's) as I made my way to somewhere else in the garden but didn't see the appearance of bean pods. Then last weekend (before the deluge of wind and rain) I was helping Sam put our decking together (to be the subject of a separate post) right next to the veg patch and there they were, gleaming green pods of ready-to-pick broad beans. I immediately fetched my trug and eagerly collected up the fattest pods and there were loads!

I love the contrast in the second picture of the bright green beans against the red bowl, the beans look so fresh and appetising. Sam cooked them up by blanching them for a couple of minutes and then adding them to a pan with some strips of streaky bacon and garlic. He finished it off with parley and mint - both from the garden and they were lovely. There really is nothing like eating something a few minutes after you've picked it from the garden, knowing exactly how it was grown and how much love and care was put into the growing. I am savouring these moments when I get them because I think with the difficult weather we have been having, I may have some disappointing harvests, or rather non-harvests this summer.

Pricking Out and Potting On

My life has been consumed with pricking out and potting on. Every spare centimetre of space in the house has been taken over with seed trays and plant pots. Each lot of seeds sown has a small window in which they should be pricked out into their own pots before they become leggy and tangled and their growth is checked. I have been having mixed success this year. I have got to lots of things just in the nick of time but I have also lost a couple of trays in their entirety because I didn't manage to pot them on in time. Sam has been very patient and understanding of me taking over the entire house and my constant reiteration that it will all be worth it in the end when the garden looks brilliant and we have loads to eat off the veg patch in the summer.

The trouble with this time of year is that although I need lots of space, because of the winds and bad weather, I can't leave too many seedlings in either the main polytunnel or in the mini greenhouses. I have learnt my lesson after losing countless plants when gusts of wind have knocked over mini greenhouses or rocked everything off of staging in the the polytunnel.

I find pricking out quite therapeutic, there's something quite nice about a repetitive task that you don't really have to think about. I quite often spend the evening pricking out seedlings with an episode of Eastenders in the background - I know how to live it up!

My top tips for pricking out are:

• Always hold seedlings by the leaves and not the roots
• Keep everything well watered - it is easier to break up damp earth than hard compacted earth
• Make sure you use clean pots and sterile seed compost, this helps prevent damping off.
• Work out how many plants you will need, and prick out a few extras just in case you lose any.
• Fill a few pots at a time and dib holes into the soil to get ready for the seedlings you will be transplanting.
• Rope in some help - if you have lots of seedlings to prick out, see if you can rope someone in to help, I always get Sam to give me a hand.

Hopefully the weather starts getting a little bit better soon so I can start moving pots into the greenhouses and maybe even out onto the plot. It's certainly beginning to feel like the growing season is well and truly underway!