Heading into summer

An update on areas of our garden from wildflowers to veg

As we hurtle toward the summer solstice on 21 June, I thought it was worth giving you an update of some areas on our farm and how plants are doing. Overall, it’s been near enough as perfect a spring for plants and wildlife as we could want.

Top tomatoes

I’m trialing 12 different cultivars of tomato for Gardeners’ World Magazine, three of each cultivar. How happy they all are.

Most have flowers about to open. This weekend I will need to start stringing them to our polytunnel’s beams to keep them upright.

Interestingly I sowed them much later than I normally would at the end of March, yet their growth has been much better. Suggesting any kind of cold getting to tomatoes by sowing earlier in spring does more harm than I’d realised. This is my best batch of plants to date - as always, grown peat free and organically.

The only other difference this year is that I didn’t plant them lower in soil or pot them into bigger pots. I just grew them later and planted them straight out once they’d reached a decent size.

They are a mix of the toughest cultivars, including my usual favourites ‘Apero’, ‘Golden Crown’ and ‘Green Zebra’. I’ll share the results in the mag next year.

Squashes and perennial veg

Here you can see our cucurbits on the left. A mix of courgettes and winter squash. Last year was a washout for them, they needed more sun and less rain. I’m optimistic that this year our cucurbits will be a success again, they’re usually easy to grow. To avoid slug problems, I grow them in pots until they have 2-3 proper leaves after their two seed leaves. By which point they’re big and burly enough, with spiky stems and hairs to deter most slugs. They will grow rapidly at that point, when planted on a good week in June, which helps them outgrow any nibblers.

On the right are a range of edible perennials I’ve been growing from seed for our garden. This tray is all destined for a new perennial edible garden I’m helping start for the charity, Grow + Graze (more on this in future).

Forever poppies

Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, appeared in our polytunnel in the first year we moved in. I’ve let one of two plants flower and set seed ever since. They are a delight. I throw the seeds around the garden where they germinate less reliably every other year when a gap emerges - poppies need bare soil to germinate. Each flower lasts a day or two before the fragile petals fall and the beautiful seed heads appear.

Pot’s Growing On?

With a good week’s worth of rain, I’ve been able to work through the enormous backlog of seedlings I had piling up in our polytunnel and propagation areas outside. This was a big relief! Both for the plants to get growing and because watering them all was becoming a pain in the bum.

As you can see in the above photo, you wouldn’t know I’ve planted anything cos the table’s still full! Next on my todo list is to plant out our purple sprouting broccoli (right of the photo), the dahlias at the back and to deal with that tray of basil...

I really should be reported for crimes against basil for not planting these seedlings into their own pots by now. I can hear them squeaking their leaves together to get out. My only excuse is that I’ve had hundreds of other seedlings to plant up. I promise they are my next task. After the broccoli…

I’m growing three different Penstemon from the twizzle series: purple, scarlet and coral. I love the colours and flower shape of these penstemon, having grown them from seed in the past. Unfortunately, I always plant them out too soon and they die, this year I plan to grow these into much larger plants before planting them into the garden. I may even keep them in pots until next spring.

I wanted to share them here because everyone says dust fine seeds won’t grow in regular multipurpose peat free compost. Our penstemon say otherwise, their seeds are dust particle size and look how healthy they are.

I have lots of seedlings and cuttings on the go - it’s fun to me, to see how all these plants grow. I love it, seeing if there’s a new leaf or more roots.

New perennial edible areas

This spring I’ve been concentrating on some new perennial edible areas, such as this design I’ve been using as a case study in my Garden Design Guide. It’s just been planted, as you can see but everything is growing rapidly since it rained. The chicken wire is doing its job, keeping our chickens out until the plants are larger, at which point they will be chicken proof and I’ll remove the wire. Our farm is almost all permanent planting, so could be called permaculture.

Allotment crops

After vowing never to grow potatoes again every year, I am of course still growing some, ‘Sarpo Mira’ and ‘Anya’ (Pink Fir Apple offspring). Keep it simple and small, with less to harvest. They’re looking healthy and so far untouched by the scourge of pheasants, that like to dig up the potatoes and peck them.

Chards and red orach. Elsewhere I have various salad crops and some asparagus, if a bit slow. All of our gooseberry, rhubarb and raspberries are coming on a treat.

Chamomile tea?

The three chamomile plants I grew last summer have become three hundred, which means we will be well covered for tea all year! If you peer into this wilderness, you’ll see our salad crops are actually growing among them.

Floof

Spring was so lovely it felt like summer had been with us for a long time but it’s really only just getting started, which is why I’ve been surprised by the incredible growth since it started raining last week. Our garden has gone from ground level to waist height almost literally overnight.

It’s the volume that caught me off guard, at once floofy and dense, as though the ground has risen. Which is partly why I don’t mind the buttercups, they’ve become part of a single rising mass that is our garden’s ecosystem.

Read more about why I’m not weeding out creeping buttercups this year

One slightly disappointing thing I’ve noticed is that our allium flowers don’t seem as strong this year, for the first time in four seasons of growth. Some of the leafy shoots haven’t flowered at all. I’m putting this down to the fact last spring and summer were incredibly gloomy and wet. No doubt impacting the amount of energy each plant could store up.

I’ll keep an eye on them next year to see if they bounce back or continue to decline. If it’s the latter, it may well be that they aren’t as tolerant of competition as their ‘Purple Sensation’ counterparts. My hunch is definitely toward the lack of energy caused by last year’s weather because it’s affecting them all, even those without much crowding.

I feel like I’m on repeat telling you about our herb garden as I covered it in detail last week, but I’ll include it here by way of an update. The main shift in such a short space of time is that Leucanthemum vulgare and Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’ are in full flower. As exciting, the three new rosemary plants I added are suddenly producing lots of strong growth, boding well for impact in the future (you can’t see them yet in photos). A couple of salvias are growing back nicely too, as is the replacement bay tree. I probably will remove a lot of the creeping buttercup and aquilegia from the right hand bed because I want to plant more herbs in that spot.

Last year I enlarged the small strip bed in front of our pigsty. While it looks like a patch of overgrown grass in this photo, and it is, there are also some plants I added that are starting to take off: Leucanthemum vulgare, which you can see, plus geraniums, persicaria and sanguisorba that you can’t. I can assure you however, they’re growing well and will be visible at some point this summer! A challenge of this bed (and another to the left) is that I’ve discovered the entire area is only about 15cm deep. The whole thing used to be a concreted carpark. Sadly this means when it was hot and dry, everything was truly frazzled and we lost a Cytisus planted in winter. Every now and then I’ll mow around the curved beds to define them.

Other than the plants, I can tell you we have bird nests everywhere, a healthy population of hedgehogs and a new member of our wild roe deer family. Today insects were abundant, especially various bee species. I even saw my first hornet! Wonderful.

Have fun, this is such a positive time of year, as gardens race out of control!