Garden at the beginning of August 2014

Thanks to some cunning lawn mowing, and despite the heat, the lawn is still looking relatively green. We followed the advice in various places about raising the height of the cutting bar on the mower, and leaving it longer between cuts, so it stays green, rather than looking like a scalped hay field.

The late summer flowers are now well and truly here. The Eryngium is huge this year, I actually had to chop some of it back as it was hanging over into our neighbour's garden! Lots of the flowers have been really popular with the bees, the Eryngium is usually covered with them. This was a bargain £1.50 plant from the garden centre near Mum a couple of years ago, now sadly closed down.

The Echinacea is flowering well too, this is another popular one with insects. I grew this one from seed.

Some of the lilies have survived, after much picking off of lily beetles when we spotted them in time! I'd forgotten I'd planted these - they were a free offer in the newspaper a couple of years ago, but I don't think did as much last year. Think they must like the sun we have this year.

The Rudbeckia is beginning to flower. I divided this in the Spring, so it's quite small (but in three sections) and will probably take a while to build up again.

The Japanese Anenome is huge too, and another one that attracts the insects. I can't quite believe how big this one has got, I planted it three years ago after buying it with some garden gift vouchers I was given on leaving a job.

The Echinops is also huge and absolutely covered in bees most of the time. This is another one I've grown from seed.

The first ripe tomato! The cherry tomatoes are now ripening a few at a time each day, but no sign of the cordon tomatoes being ripe anytime soon!

The sweet peas I planted in a container have been covered in flowers for weeks now. It's quite hard to keep on top of the deadheading to keep the flowers coming. Here I've taken pre-emptive action and snipped off more flowers to have in a jar inside the house in the hope of not having to deadhead quite so soon again.

The raspberries are now ripening at full tilt. These are Autumn Bliss variety, and we're getting about double this quantity every week at the moment.

Garden at the beginning of May 2014

Despite not being at work on 1st May, I forgot to take any photos until 4th and 5th!  And then didn't get round to writing a post until 10th! Oh well.

The garden's looking a lot more vibrant now. The lawn is nice and lush, and the flowerbeds are beginning to fill properly with vegetation from the perennials as the bulb foliage begins to die down. I love the bulbs, but I do hate the 6 week or so wait with all the leaves hanging around afterwards!

I've done a lot of sorting out on our patio, including finishing off planting herbs in containers so that they are easy to access from the kitchen (this includes: mint, lavender, sage, rosemary, chives, coriander and parsley plus a bay tree outside, and some basil sown inside for the windowsill). There's also some sweet peas in a container with canes in to provide support, and this year I'm growing salad in containers as it'll be easier to protect from slugs, as well as being easier to cut when it's just on the patio! The other plants are a couple of roses (one a wedding present, one a new home present when I moved into my new house in Newark in 2006), and fuchsias, some of which I've grown from cuttings. When it gets a bit warmer I'll also be growing tomatoes on the patio.

Which herbs would you grow? I think those I've mentioned above are all the ones I use regularly in cooking.

This is one of the plants I bought on the day out to Clandon Park. There are already tiny gooseberries growing! I hadn't had gooseberries in years, but I was inspired by some we picked and ate in a crumble when I went to stay with Mostly Knitting last summer.

This is one of the first borders in the back garden that we planted up when we moved in four years ago. I think we did this border about three years ago (we didn't do much in the first year as we wanted to see what came up where and when). These plants were chosen to be very drought-tolerant, which is a bit ironic considering what the weather was like over the winter. There's a hebe, which actually used to be in a pot in the front garden. The convolvulus has never flowered as much as this before, I think it likes the warm weather we've had this year. Behind it there's a couple of ornamental grasses.

These are the English bluebells, which we planted about three years ago as well. The rest of the garden has been colonised by Spanish bluebells, which I dig out every time I find some!

First flowers on the strawberry plants!

The clematis is covered with flowers this year too. This one is "The President", the same variety I had at Newark as well. This one was from an offer in Gardeners' World magazine.

And cherry tomato plug plants potted up.