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!