Long Mizzle Garden

A happy mid-week to you,   What a hot week it has been. Here's Wonder Beast claiming the only cool part of the garden. As our temperature gauge on the back patio tiles hit beyond 50 C, Monsieur wanted to crack out an egg to see how quickly it would cook. Shame we didn’t have any.    I did manage to get a few fun, colour coordinated washes in though. (When we first moved in, my mam said she could see our washing line from the other side of town, but the trees have since obscured this view) As I type, it has just started spotting with rain here, and with thunder storm weather warnings issued, it is no surprise the local farmers been hurriedly bringing in the hay.    I’ve been enjoying my week off with the kids and in between mowing, mulching and weeding duties, Long Mizzle continues to reward us with ripened greenhouse tomatoes, French beans and more courgettes and cut flowers than we can keep up with.   [Courgetti and home grown tomatoes]    ...

Good morning, and what a beautiful one it is too. As it looked to be another scorcher, I opened the greenhouse door before 8am (already at 30 C), spot checked the overnight slug damage to the sunflowers, brought down the big watering can full of last night’s shower water run-off and watered the patio plants. Then I got straight on to cutting flowers and deadheading spent ones.   The red and ‘totally tangerine’ dahlias are looking great, but all the white cactus ones are annoyingly being nibbled. I cut every single sweet pea flower I could find, being careful not to disturb the silvery spider webs.      [Sweet Peas]   For filler I picked fennel and feather top grass, but as the Oregano is past its best, I am today trying the evergreen foliage of Photinia red robin.    [Feather top grass and Fennel growing by the willow arch]   A total of six jam jars were filled and placed in our cool north facing kitchen, ready for arranging later....