August has passed in the blink of an eye so I thought I would do a little round up of what I managed to document this past month… It’s been a whirlwind and a busy one at that! The garden shows might have ended but the garden has kept us on our toes and provided an endless list of jobs.
The flower border has been blooming beautifully the past month and we’ve loved being greeted by a riot of colour when we come out the back door. The Gladioli in particular have put on the best show and I can’t wait to grow more next year.
We also made a start on harvesting the onions and shallots with a little help… My brother, sister-in-law and nephew all recently moved to be closer to us and we are so happy to have them here, my brother will actually be joining the family business too!
My nephew has loved spending time in the garden with us and couldn’t wait to harvest the onions. So together with my Dad, they both pulledn up all the onions, red onions and shallots to store and dry out in the shed. A job well done!
My little row of Calendula has also been a big hit this year, all I seem to be doing lately is pick the flower heads! I’ve managed to harvest around 5 trug’s worth and I’m over the moon with them. The plan is to dry the heads and then create some Caledula infused oil to make my own lip balms and salves with. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years now but I’m finally going to tick it off my bucket list. The sweet almond oil has been purchased and then flower heads are drying happily away inside the workshop.
A new flower I’m trying this year is Statice and it’s safe to say that I’ll be growing it next year too! I only had room for around 8 plants but the crop has just been stunning, so next year I’m tempted to grow a whole row to maximum effect. I cut a huge bundle before we were forecast for rain and tied them together to hang from the workshop (thank goodness we had a big workshop!) I’ve always loved dried flowers so I have plans to grow more variaties next year once we’re more settled, I feel like everything was rushed this year. The dream is to have a potting shed full of homegrown dried flowers hanging from the ceiling!
Amongst all the harvesting, weeding and work we also managed to have a couple of wonderful days out with the family. When we moved here last year we headed down to our local village day 2 weeks after we had moved, it was an amazing fair and we vowed to enter a few things next time. Well the time came around and even though we weren’t really prepared we decided to enter a few things anyway. So my Mum entered a single stem Gladioli, I also entered 3 pompom dahlias and entered my hand knitted shawl into the handicraft section… Even though my Dahlias didn’t get placed my Mum came first with her beautiful Gladioli and my shawl also got a first as well as a perpetual cup for overall best handicraft item! We were so incredibly happy with the outcome and we can’t wait for next year. Hopefully the garden will be a bit more established so we can enter more categories, this showing marlarky is very addictive!
And that was basically August; a mixture of sunshine, rain and happy memories. When we aren’t in the garden we’ve been busy working and trying to list as much stock on the website as possible. So it does feel like Summer has passed us all by in a flash, what with the garden, work and preparing for more new arrivals this month… but I’ll talk more about the chickens in the next blog post!
I hope you all had a wonderful August x
