Summer Garden Update

It’s been a big year for our house in 2017. We’ve renovated our en suite bathroom, we’ve partly redone the kitchen, the downstairs bathroom has been all updated, and I’ve also done my sewing room – I’ll be writing more about that soon. And we’ve also moved our focus outside to the garden too.

Our garden isn’t very big – it’s actually a lot smaller than our last house but is a lovely, manageable size for us right now as we only have evenings and weekends (mostly bank holiday weekends, it would seem!). Over those two Bank Holidays I’ve linked to, we first sorted out a couple of hanging baskets and herb planters, plus planted some tomatoes and smaller plants; we then moved onto bigger things, including getting a greenhouse to grow our tomatoes taller in and planting potatoes.

I think I’ve mentioned before, but the people who lived in our house before weren’t exactly garden people. By this I mean that we had quite an array of interesting things going on in the garden that didn’t quite work. Such as the random giant fennel plant growing out of the side of the garage in a patch of bog. And the sage plant that spanned the whole back bed of the garden. What can I say, they must have liked herbs?! There was also a Monkey Puzzle tree planted underneath a cherry tree, and a mini hazel tree to the side of that. The cherry tree is lovely, but the other two had to go as they didn’t quite fit under the cherry tree and cut off half of the garden if they remained.

The issue with the cherry tree though was that it had been pruned very oddly at some point in the past so was growing a bit…all over the place, let’s just say. So one afternoon, Ben took to it with a pair of garden shears and cut it right back. I was slightly horrified as it looked like a stick with a few leaves, but now I have to say he was right (don’t tell him I said so!). We’ve had several neighbours stop by to comment on how lovely it looks now it’s been trimmed back and has a proper shape again!

Our hanging baskets are also helping the tree to look a lot more colourful and sprightly now. We’d only hung them in the tree to keep them out the way till we’d put up the hangers for them, but ended up leaving them there as they looked pretty. I spotted another neighbour pointing these out to her friends the other day – our garden seems to be getting lots of compliments on the little bits of work we’ve done to it!

And onto the greenhouse – wow, look at those tomatoes compared to how they looked as babies! We’ve had at least 50 tomatoes off the plants so far and are expecting hundreds more, they’ve gone crazy! I’d initially wanted something bigger than the greenhouse we bought to not only house tomatoes but to act more as a summer house. We’ve always wanted a proper outdoor kitchen, but after we stayed in a villa in Florida that had a proper one, we’ve decided we need one. A summer house would be ideal to add to this to store food and drinks and have somewhere to shelter too. Alas, not this garden though! It’s definitely too small to house anything bigger than our little greenhouse and BBQ area, but I have big plans for outbuildings in our next house, whenever that might be. Airbnbs and yoga studio plans are afoot in my head!

And finally, unpictured but…our potatoes are ready! And, more importantly, edible! For some reason I thought potatoes would be really difficult to grow – they just seem like only the kind of thing professional gardeners can magic out of the ground. But it turns out you just stick a seed potato into the ground (or bucket, in our case), give it plenty of water and wait, and potatoes galore! So impressed 😀

How’s your garden growing this summer?