OMG it's cold!

I'm officially fed up with winter now....it's been frozen for nearly two and a half months and even the Snowdrops are looking dismayed. I don't think I can remember a winter quite as prolonged and without respite as this. Sadly there have definitely been some casualties along the way, the Anemones planted optimistically in October have almost all rotted off and still the Sweet Peas are looking dreadful. You've got to keep you're chin up though as it goes with the territory of working alongside nature. I'm sure there will be some pleasant surprises along the way as well doom and gloom.

Yay, hooray the new website for The Walled Garden www.thewalledgardenatmells.co.uk went live this week, we had lots of fun integrating Paypal as a safe and efficient mode for customers to pay for their bouquets. Hopefully it proves to be smooth and easy to use. I almost feel like I have birthed a new child.

At the moment I'm clearing and tidying all the beds in the garden and planning a 100ft rose garden with the view to becoming self sufficient in roses. I have to admit to having rather a wary relationship with roses, generally feeling that they are inhabited with a malevolent spirit intent on causing pain and injury to everyone and to me in particular. In precisely the same way that if there is a stinging nettle within 6ft of my location I am guaranteed to get stung if I find myself anywhere near a rose I end up lacerated and with tears in my eyes. However due to their unutterable beauty and the glamour and romance that they lend to any arrangement and also to their longevity of season I am willing to work on our relationship problems.

Looking at the long range forecast it seems as if these tundric conditions are set to remain until the end of February which means that March will be almost terrifying with its force. There is very little point in starting to sow seed until it has warmed up by a few degrees, at which point everything will go crazy and demand attention. The wait is almost painful.

At least the greenhouse is tidy..the Cornflowers( in shades of blue, black and red) are looking great and I've taken advantage of some of the brief interludes of above zero degrees to plant them out thereby leaving some space for the new seeds as they come along.

Two weeks until opening.....OMG indeed!

Brrrrrr and Happy New Year

Well it's well and truly Winter out there now and having taken a couple of months off over November and December it felt great to get back to work today. The soil was as hard as rock with Do Not Disturb etched into the frost and the Garden was full of Blackbirds fluffed up against the cold , squabbling for birdseed. Although this weather is breathtakingly beautiful I hope we can get some digging done soon.

New Year's Resolution...to update the blog more regularly. Late summer slipped through my fingers last year and it all got left behind so this year I'm going let you know what's flowering at the beginning of each month and post some pretty pictures. I'm really looking forward to this year in the Walled Garden...all of the excitement of last year but with less of the nerves

Sweet Pea Disaster (almost) We very very nearly lost the whole crop this year due to some particularly hungry field mice. The October sown seeds were completely scoffed with one very cheeky mouse family making a nest in one of the empty pots. The devastation wasn't discovered until mid November which didn't leave much time to order new seeds..hrumphh and get them germinated and slightly grown up before the weather turned really cold. On last inspection they were still intact but looking rather vulnerable to sharp teeth and cold nights so fingers crossed they make it through.

Plans Afoot and Opening Times....We'll be open for businesss from the 1st March for online bouquets and at the Walled Garden for Plants, Flowers and Teas . Flowers can be delivered to most of the UK from Tuesday to Saturday and this year the Walled Garden will be open from Wednesday - Sunday 10am to 4pm daily. We will be launching a brand new website for the Walled Garden next month so watch this space.......

What's all the Fussell about?

Any old iron . . . cast around 1860, found in a heritage tool seller's stall in Honiton last week; now landed less than a mile from where it was forged and ground.

http://www.fussells.org/04story.html

http://webapp1.somerset.gov.uk/her/details.asp?prn=23853

Eastnor Castle 2009

BigChill Snapshots:

Festival Time Again

Summer must well and truly be here as we are off to WOMAD, Charlton Park next week to do all the flowers for the artist dressing rooms and hanging out areas. Always something to look forward to, although this year I'm going to try to be more organised and sort the flowers into arrangements before I go, rather than turn up with a Landrover bursting with blooms and then have a five hour arranging stint on arrival. I also promise not to shriek too much as we buggy them around to the stages. Same thing at the Big Chill festival a fortnight later...pleeeease come out and play sunshine.

Frome Festival

Frome is fab I've decided. We don't live there but I'm angling for a move there in the not too distant future. There's always loads going on and this year's festival was no exception. We took a market stall to the Green Fair where we practically sold out of flowers and met lots of lovely people. I had forgotten how much work it is doing market stalls. Since we've take on the Walled Garden we haven't done any this year, a case of not being able to be in two places at once and our weekends in the garden being so busy. It is exciting though, I always get nervous beforehand and am convinced that we won't sell a thing and always come home with a glow and very few flowers. This year Kevin McCloud from Grand Designs opened the Green Fair but seemed to forget to come and say hello, I tried to catch his eye but he probably thought I was just being strange and stayed far away.



Tea Time



Mmmmm look at that chocolate cake. Remember we're open every weekend over the summer for tea, coffee, cordials and cake.

Relax on the straw bales in the sunshine and watch the Bees being busy.





Here comes the Sun
After two years of quite frankly miserable summers this year's good weather is even better than gorgeous. It's been a bit too hot for the young plants in the greenhouse even with all the vents open and the poor things have fried if I've been late with the watering in the morning. I've had to snip off the sunscorched leaves, muttering apologies and promising not to spray water around at midday again.

We've relined the pond....yay, it was just a muddy hole with a cracked liner and about 6 inches of fish poo and looked awful in the middle of the garden. June was just so busy we didn't get the time to deal with it but now we have and it looks great (if a little green).

It was very tempting to get in and have a swim but i kept remebering all those little stones hiding underneath the liner and didn't dare risk it.

I do, I do and I do again
Eight days, four weddings, two funerals and loads of gift bouquets....aaaagh, thank goodness for Rosie helping out. The end of May, beginning of June is Peony time. Beautiful, beautiful Peonies immediately lending a touch of glamour and a subtle, sweet scent. Our first big wedding of the Summer was definitely a Peony wedding, we used bowls of pink and white peonies on the tables, Peony and Sweet Pea bouquets and church arrangements with a beautiful dark raspberry pink Peony throughout.
Then we had Jane and Mark's wedding at Priston Mill, a lovely old water mill that suited our flowers perfectly. We painted up large baked bean tins, dressed them with raffia and filled them with flowers. They looked gorgeous.

We need to gather examples of all our wedding pictures together and put a wedding page on the website methinks....

May

April Fun

Can't believe it's been a month since I last posted a blog. After a furiously busy Mother's Day when the local post office groaned under the influx of bouquets needing posting April kicked off with Belle and Graham's beautiful wedding at Stourhead. I'm waiting on some proper flower photos but in the mean time have these ones taken in the shed.
We used pretty white baskets for the table centerpieces overflowing with gorgeous deep burgundy Peony Tulips (Uncle Tom), Anemones and cream scented narcissi. The morning had me clambering up the fireplace in the reception hall hanging on by my toes attaching a spring flower garland, fortunately I just had it in place and the ivy swept off the floor about 3 minutes before the newly weds walked in...phew

We used the baskets in a slightly different way for a wedding at the end of March when we had them planted up with spring flowers, delicate Cardamine, Primroses, Fritillaria, Pulmonaria "Sissinghurst White". This was great because the couple were able to give the baskets as gifts at the end of the day. The flowers could then be planted out into gardens giving a lovely long lasting memories of the day.

Easter Monday shone forth upon the brilliant Mells Daffodil Day. We had decided to serve tea and cake in the Walled garden on the day so the week previous had me up to my elbows in flour and eggs. Chef extrordinaire Charlotte kept a close eye on proceedings and guided me on the secrets of chocolate fudge cake icing, lemon drizzleing and toasting coconut and between us we baked up about fifty cakes.

I wanted the garden to look as pretty as possible so as well as some last minute panicy weeding Sunday had me making up table flowers
and Monday morning started at about 5.30am setting out the tables, firing up the urn and generally having a panic.












By 11am we were packed out and all the cake had been eaten by 3pm. I can't remember ever feeling so tired at the end of a day.


It was a great day though and we're already getting excited about next year.

Mr Bishop from the Bath Natural Theatre Co delighted visitors with his Flowerpot Man

Now the greenhouse beckons, the overcast weather forecast for the rest of this week will be perfect for all that pricking out that needs doing. I'm even beginning to eye up a few things that might be able to be planted out soon.

The first indoor sweet pea flower buds are budding but I cruelly pinched them out. It's too soon for them to flower, they need to build up some strength first but it's a sign that the year is moving apace.

I'll leave you with this bit of Spring

Spring is here (very nearly almost)

And we're off........hurrah, opened the doors to the Walled Garden on 1st March and started taking orders for this seasons flowers. It's lovely working with blooms again after what seems ages working with soil, sheds and pots. Although there were many times this winter when I raised by eyes to the heavens and thanked all things good that I didn't have to put up any more polytunnels . Shudder, last year's pain still runs deep.

The spring posies (pictured left) are selling well and I'm making abundant use of all the glorious Hellebores in the garden. There's a trick to giving Hellebores a long vase life, but I'm not going to tell you...you'll have to come on one of the courses and find out...ha! Anyway they are a beautiful dark purple and look great with the equally dark and mysterious Green Iris that I've bought in from Cornwall.

It's been a bit strange buying some English flowers in from other sources but I just haven't got enough of our own flowers at the moment to meet demand. Our Anemones are doing well now and the Tulips are budding up to my amazement. I didn't think any of them would cope with the waterlogged conditions up the farm but they seem to have survived so I'll reward them by lifting them in the summer and briinging them down to the more hospitable soil in the garden. The Cerinthe is boldly beginning to strut it's stuff so I'll begin to include it's lovely blue leaves in arrangements soon and as soon as the Euphorbia stops looking so raggedy we can get a nice lime green injection into some of the bouquets...then we know Spring has arrived.

The Sweet Peas are in...phew, I planted half of them at the farm in the tunnel and half outside in the garden. Hopefully this will extend the season by a couple of weeks. I've never grown cordon Sweet peas outside before but I've been told that their colour is more vibrant without the polythene to fiulter out some of the lightwaves....we'll wait and see.

Busy week next week for Mother's Day, Jon and I are off leafleting some Farmer's Markets this weekend to spread our good word and I think we are getting some radio coverage as well so we could be very very busy. Mustn't forget my own mum .....wouldn't that be awful sending flowers to everyone else's mum and not mine!!

We've got our annual Soil Association inspection next week as well so I'll probably spend this weekend checking through paperwork making sure all the T's are dotted and I's crossed (ooops). They're always really nice and usually really helpful. Hopefully next week will also bring some sunshine and warmer temperatures. I'm desperately trying to hold back on sowing too much because everything I have sown so far is sulking and refusing to germinate and I'm chomping at the bit to get going. Hmmm, I'll remind myself about that in 4 weeks time when everything has goine crazy.

Frozen February

That'll teach me for feeling overconfident in January, won't it!! Just as I was getting on top of all the jobs needing doing now we're frozen solid and have been for nearly ten days. It has all been looking a bit pretty though. Digging and rotovating have had to stop but I have been able to get on with some other tasks.

At the end of January I journeyed down to Westonzoyland (what a fab name) to Somerset Willow Growers www.willowgrowers.co.uk to buy some willow to make a screen in the Walled Garden. It went a bit wonky as I went round the corner but overall I was quite pleasesd at the end. we'll see if it's still standing in a year's time...hmmmm.

We got all the apple trees pruned and had a couple of great bonfires, dug out the remains of the previous tenant's polytunnels and got down to preparing the soil for planting. the aim is to have all the ground prep completed by the end of February so I can spend most of March and April up at the farm sowing and growing this year's flowers.

We've got a busy Spring lined up . The flower selling season kicks off on the 1st March with Anenomes, Tulpis, Ranunculus and Narcissi. All our bulbs are coming along nicely but I don't think we will have nearly enough so we've also sourced some lovely growers down in Cornwall who we will be buying from during March. The Walled Garden will be open every Sunday from 10am to 4pm from 1st March so do pop in for a visit and say "Hi".

A New Year and a New Garden

Well here we are again and here we go again. The new year has brought with it a new garden and some very chilly mornings. We picked up the keys to the walled garden on the 2nd January and immediately went exploring and making plans. It's a beautiful spot with half of the garden planted up with herbaceous perennials and the other half bare and ready to be planted up with annuals.

We'll have to be clever with our planting plans this year as it will take a couple of years for this site to become certified organic which means of course that none of the flowers cropped from here can be sold as organic for the next two seasons. We're keeping the organic land at the farm for the foreseeable future so plan to split the planting between the two but with most of the annuals down at the garden so they can benefit from the sheltered, warmer microclimate. Hopefully, most of our customers won't mind us mixing the flowers but if so they'll be able to chose from a more limited range. Phew it's going to be busy managing two sites this year.

Our most exciting discovery was this secret herbaceous border hidden behind the south wall. It must have originally been used for peaches and other difficult to ripen fruit trees as there are fireplaces at intervals which would have been lit to warm the stone. I spent a fair few years obsessing about kitchen gardens and visiting as many as possible but I don't think I've seen anything quite like it before. Talk about a sunny border...it can't get sunnier than that.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I might have some keen friends who will be happy to come and help in exchange for armfuls of flowers. This would be a lovely project on just on its own.

It's difficult to get a good picture of this half of the garden but this is where the real work will be going on. Fortunately the previous tenants had polytunnels in here and most of the soil has been covered with groundcover sheeting for a significant time. This means that apart from a couple of brambles trying to get a hold around the edge there are no perennial weeds. Compared to my luscious crops of Docks at the farm this feels like heaven. The plan for January and February is to get this tidied up, prune all the fruit trees, rotavate the bare soil and get all the plant supports in place before March madness begins.
Brrrr better get down there........

Heaven is a Walled Garden

After an incredible series of coincidences something amazing has happened this week. As from the 1st January we will be the tenants of what could be the most beautiful Walled Garden in the world. (Superlatives are acceptable in this situation). About one and a half acres in size and situated in the centre of the the gorgeous village of Mells, Somerset it will be the perfect new home for BOB.

Until very recently the garden has been the home of the lovely Meadows plant nursery but Sue and Eddie have recently moved on leaving the garden in need of new hands. It's actually two gardens with one half being laid out to established perennial borders and plant standing out areas and the other half essentially empty, just waiting to be planted out with rows and rows of cutting flowers

We'll have to wait for a couple of years for the garden to become certified organic so will continue operating mainly from the farm until we move down properly in Autumn 2010. In the mean time though we have some exciting plans for the Walled Garden including running workshops on growing and arranging cut flowers from your own garden and holding some Open Days throughout the Summer so you can come and share a cup of tea and piece of cake with us and maybe buy some plants for your own cutting patch.

Watch this space, I'll keep you posted.

At Last!

Pretty things

Bits of BoB

My lovely, nutty husband spent ages throwing this long lost and newly found horse shoe into the air just to get a photo for the blog...so here it is. The other photos have me staring quizzically back at him seriously wondering if he's losing the plot.

We started September thinking we were winding down and immediately proceeded to become really busy with phone, internet and postal orders. It's been great cutting the flowers to order rather than carrying out the twice weekly massacre for markets which characterised August. That little bit of sunshine has really brought on the Zinnias which have now extended their stems in response to the warmth so they can be cut long enough to be included in hand tied bouquets.

I'm in hand tied bouquet heaven at the moment with all of September's orders. With so little floristry training ie. none I started the summer arranging all my bouquets in the vase first and then wrapping loosely sometimes with cellophane and sometimes with brown paper. as I became more brave I began to experiment with hand ties and was pleasantly suprised with the results. Finally after a short course with Rachel Lilley in Bath I now can't stop hand tying everything. The first half of the bouquet usually feels like a failure and just as I think I'm going to have to start again suddenly the duck turns into a swan and I get goosebumps at how beautiful it is....and that's every single time...that's a whole lot of goosebumps.

Packaging is also at the forefront of my mind at the moment. We've made lots of good packaging decisions this year ie using biodegradable cellophane, brown paper and string as the basis for all our flower wrapping but I think we can go further. I've now found somewhere I can order recycled brown paper at the weight and size we use so will be ordering that for next season. I also had a bit of a worry about Jute string as Jute tends to be grown in India and I know nothing about the environmental impacts of it as a crop in that country so I had quick look at whether Hemp string would a viable alternative. Unfortunately I found out that none of the UK grown hemp is used for making twine so I managed to find an organic source of Jute 3 ply instead. At least I can feel more confident that an organic certification body is monitoring the impacts of production on my behalf even if it is still being imported. If anyone has any twine sourcing experiences feel free to share. Cellophane is a natural polymer made from cellulose and is totally biodegradable and is the best choice I've been able to find so far. Next on my list is vegetable inks for printing and organic sheep fleece instead of cotton wool for hydrating postal bouquets...watch this space!

What else is going on? The Anenomes and Ranunculus are in, tulps are still waiting for me to find them some space, I've planted out some lovely black cornflowers, Cerinthe and Malope trifida today. I've never grown Malope before, it's a bit of a Sarah Raven special so I'm looking forward to getting to know it. The weeds are making me shudder in horror but I keep telling myself that we've got 6 months to get completely tidied up before Spring...the worst thing about weeding is that it's giving me time to think and grow ideas. Soon I'll have so many I'll be hand tying them with organic twine.

Party Time

I'm one of those slightly sad people that quite likes clearing up after a good party and that's what this week feels like. Bleary from a lack of sleep and too much excitement, peering at all the debris, remembering all the glamour from the night before and wondering where to start with the big tidy up.
The rain finally beat us this weekend, we had two lots of wedding flowers being picked up on Thursday and the plan was to spend Friday cutting for the Farmer's market at Midsomer Norton on Saturday and The Tobacco Factory on Sunday. The wedding flowers were fine thank goodness but I could feel the plants slipping into Autumn as we slipped in September, if the sun had shone for any significant length of time I'm sure they would have picked up and given us another three weeks of cropping. As it is they've just had enough of being rained on with no time to dry out in between soakings....except the Dahlias that is...they are loving it. If we could just do a market stall of Dahlias we'd be laughing. Hence sadly no, so we had to cancel our market pitches and decided to finish the season a couple of weeks early.

Words cannot describe how nice that lie in was on Saturday morning and as if on cue just in case we should think about relaxing too much Royal Mail delivered a box containing about 4,000 assorted Spring bulbs which will need planting over the next couple of months. Before they go in beds will have to be cleared and the list of winter jobs is extending daily.

It's a good time to stop and take stock of what's worked and what hasn't over the past few months and realise how much further forward we are now compared to this time last year. Thank god we don't have to put up any more polytunnnels this winter. If I squint I almost think we might be able to get everything weeded, manured, dug, sowed and planted in time for next April.

In the mean time...Dahlias anybody?

Recession and Downturn

As it's been nearly three weeks since we've posted anything, I thought I would weigh in with some sombre musings on how the impending recession, downturn and credit crunch coupled with some comical and amateurish governance might conspire to pull the rug from under B.O.B before she's even built up a head of steam. But then I thought better of it. I'll leave Jo recount the latest markets, weddings and other opportunities which have cropped up; it's been really busy, ontop of the growing needs to prepare, sow, cultivate and get ready for next year. We're both looking forward to a long weekend down on the Gower at the end of the month, getting wet, covered in sand and best of all; sleeping . . . . Meanwhile we push on. These two pictures are of the landy stuffed to bursting point last Sunday morning as we went off to the Love Food Festival at the Paintworks. It started slowly, but turned out great in the end.

The Sweet Pea tunnel is cleaned out now and we've started digging in the manure that we were given, hopefullywill get that all finished in the next week or so and covered up with Mypex. Then go to work humble Lumbricus terrestris, do your magic!

Great Elm Physick Garden

A few days before this seemingly endless rain started pouring down I had a phonecall from Liv O'Hanlon from The Great Elm Physick Garden. Liv's company makes gorgeous organic skincare products (www.greatelmphysickgarden.com) and is based about 6 miles away from the farm.

Liv contacted me because we had both attended a Soil Association workshop about growing and supplying organic herbs to the health and beauty industry which is a burgeoning sector of the organic movement at present. Currently over 85% of the organic herbs used in health and beauty products are imported from overseas, some are gathered from the wild and some are farmed in countries with much lower labour costs than you can find here.

I had attended the workshop because I had a surfeit of Calendula (English Marigold). In fact I had loads of it and a bit bright on the eye it was too. Anyway, I thought there must be someone who has a use for organic Calendula and maybe for some of the other flowers that we grow. The day was very interesting but I realised that supplying herbs for other uses would probably involve drying them first and that I would have to find time (and space in my head) to put together a drying system. I also thought that maybe the winter would be a good time to do some more homework and contact some of the manufacturers to see which crops they might be interested in.

A week later Liv made contact to ask if we knew where she might be able to find a large quantity of fresh Marigold.......what a perfect circle. The next day she came to the farm with her two teenage sons and quickly and efficiently picked 4.5 kilos of fresh flowers. She then took them back and dried them to an end weight of 0.8 kilos dried flowers and preserved them in Almond oil
Liv is thrilled that she has found a source of English Organic Calendula so close to home and I am very happy that our flowers can have two roles to play in the outside world. We are both now very excited about working together on crops for next year.

Bath Life Magazine visits BOB

A couple of weeks ago a lovely journalist came to visit the farm and I spent most of the time trying to stand between her and the weeds.
Anyway she can't have been too shocked because she wrote a very nice column about us which is available to view online... if you go to http://www.bathlifemag.co.uk/ and navigate to page 14/15 you can read for yourself.

Market Marathon

Keynsham yesterday; Southville, Bristol (Tobacco Factory) today; we're filled with weekend market madness! We've been sales-happy flower-drenched retailers, hawking our wares (or bearing our hawks) like career carnies this weekend. Keynsham yesterday had the feel of the Roundabout Zoo about it (ref: BBC League of Gentleman)) but we covered our pitch and diesel. It looked gorgeous though; colourful, structural and exciting on the eye (there are only so many ways that pork chops can be shrink-wrapped and stacked in polystyrene, and I speak as one who respects his pork). Sunday morning and Jo was up at Hackmead cutting by 0530 hrs; I wobbled up at 0800 and off we went to bring the BOB experience to Bristol.

A slow start, a gentle middle which eased off to a stately and quiet end. Hmmm. It hit us both at about the same time; around about 11 a.m.; we'd had lots of interest and lots of well dressed window shoppers; but everyone seemed to be looking at us as purely 'sellers' and not 'growers'. At the farmers markets it's evident that Jo grows everything on our stand but today we just looked like a hungover florists (I speak for myself there, and in fact; just hung-over). It was only a couple of customers who had worked or trained in floristry that recognised what Jo's blooms represented; I reckon about 80% of our sales were purely 0n visual impact alone; which is great in itself, but begs the question that does the fact Jo coaxes these things out of our own ground in fact matter? Does it matter how, where and why the flowers have arrived? It does to us, obviously, but does it to whoever hands over the folding and chinking stuff?

U.S.P. Unique Selling Point. I think we have to work on it before next weekend's market; we know what it is, but we maybe have to spell it out more clearly for potential customers? Although I'm not that confident of my ability to spel corecttly.

USP:

or proposition - this is what makes the product offer competitively strong and without direct comparison; generally the most valuable unique advantage of a product or service, for the market or prospect in question; now superseded by UPB.
www.bizjobs.com/business_glossary.php

Abbreviation for selling point. A differentiating factor that makes a company and their product or service better than a competitor's.
www.tractionsearch.com/se-dictionary.co

A Unique Selling Proposition is a statement that identifies what makes a person, product or organisation different from competitors.
www.simply.com.au/glossary.php

Let's get spelling!
JPx