Thursday, July 09, 2015

Garden at the beginning of the month July 2015

I am really behind with blogging. For various reasons, June was a rather frantically busy month. I am also really behind on reading blogs and commenting, so apologies if I usually comment on your blog and haven't done in about six weeks!

Part of the delay was me putting off posting because it takes sooooooo long to upload photos. Our internet connection isn't the best because of the joys of copper wires (no fibre optic down our road), and I used to use a free photo editing program to batch reduce the size of photos before posting, which made it much quicker. Since I got a new laptop that nice program has disappeared from my computer though. I was selecting photos for the blog, and then having to leave the computer for 90 minutes whilst they uploaded, which isn't ideal. Anyway, I have found a way to reduce the size of photos on the new laptop, which isn't quite batch doing it, but is quicker, so hopefully that will help. Anyone else got any tips?!

As you can see from this picture, it's been hot. And there hasn't been much rain. The lawn is beginning to look rather brown.


We've got loads of fruit ripening, both of the apple trees are covered in apples, which I thinned in June in the hope it will allow some of them to ripen to a decent size. The apples on the standard tree are already turning red, which I think is all the sun they've had.


The Autumn fruiting raspberry canes have been covered in berries, and I've already eaten several bowls. Looks like we're going to be eating raspberries non-stop for months at this rate!


The espalier apples are smaller as they tend to ripen later than the other tree. I really had to thin this one out as it was so covered in apples the branches were drooping!


Sedum flowering
Can't remember what this one is called, it was part of a mega-buy plug plant pack about four years ago

The lavender seems to be enjoying the heatwave.


The rose has been covered with flowers


My favourite fuchsia! Although it's a bit of a pain keeping the containers watered in this weather.


Another fuchsia, this one was in the garden when we bought the house (not that we knew it then, as it was snowing!). Remember snow? Remember cold? Yep, seems like a distant memory.

This is Escallonia 'Pink elle', which grew really tall since last year and has loads of flowers developing. It's flowered about a month later than our other Escallonia.


This is the first of the hydrangeas to start flowering.


Some more of my fuchsias! The middle one I grew from a cutting, and the one on the right is a new one I bought on holiday at Croome.


Are you in the middle of a heatwave too?

5 comments:

Iris said...

Yay, you are back! I checked in on your blog a few times over the past month, thinking I must have missed a post... I hear you, though, on the busy June. I was absolutely frantic with work stuff for a few weeks and only just kept up with the absolute necessities while I could merely watch, powerlessly, as the house and garden fell apart around me, lol. I'm still trying to get back to normal now, and we'll be on holiday in a week's time!

The apples in your garden look great, and I am very envious of those raspberries. We had a ton of strawberries this month but I've never been very successful with raspberries. The other day I spied one berry (!!) on the canes in the allotment, but it didn't look quite ripe yet. I'm hoping to get there either today or tomorrow so perhaps I can harvest it then - unless it has already been eaten by birds!

Is that purple flower perhaps Sweet William? The foliage looks similar...

Unknown said...

It's looking lovely, I love the yellow colour of your rose. Your fuschias are looking gorgeous too. I need to get round to taking photos of my garden for this month too, can't believe it's the 10th already :-o

Liz H said...

Try this image editing programming:
Irfanview
It's what him indoors uses.

Victoria said...

Everything is so lovely. I'm so impressed by your edible plants! :)

ShinyNewThing said...

I've been using a free download called Resiz-O-Matic for several years, you just right click on an image (or on a batch of images all selected) and then select from one of three preset sizes (I usually use Medium which is about 640px wide) and it converts them all in seconds. Worcester sounds great, we looked around there many years ago but I think we were camping, not in a luxe flat!