“I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.”
L. M. Montgomery
The 21st June was the astronomical start to summer as well as being Midsummers Day. I find it quite tiring having so much daylight. Particularly when the dawn chorus wakes me up by 4am. Its lovely to hear the birds, but there are limits.
Talking of birds. We get a variety of birds in our garden, and we have residents. A pair of blackbirds are living in a nest at the side of the garden. We see them eating in the garden all the time and make sure there are things around for them to feed on. Hopefully they are feasting on our slugs. Did you know that when a slug is attacked by a predator it will contract its body to make it a smaller target? The mucus that covers a slug’s body doesn’t taste very nice and is slippery. So this is why you will often see birds wiping slugs on the grass before they eat them.
We have finished repotting in the garden for the summer. And most of the plants are out now. Although some are still in the yard waiting to be added to features in the garden which are being made over the next month. And we have about 80 sunflowers looking for a new home. We have been putting excess plants onto the garden table for people to take. So keep a look out and help yourself to any that you want.
The veg garden is doing well, particularly as we’ve had a bit of rain this week along with the sunshine. Mid-week we picked peas, which were so good they were eaten raw by Claire. And today I picked green French beans for my tea. The purple ones will be ready in a week. No sign of the yellow ones yet though. We have a multi-coloured vegetable garden this year with lots of other coloured veg making an appearance over the summer.
The veg garden also has fruit in it this year. The strawberries in the hanging basket are being eaten as they ripen. The rhubarb has got really big now too. I wasn’t intending to pull any so it could get established. But a couple of sticks have been pulled to encourage other sticks to grow. It’s unlikely that our gooseberry cutting will fruit for a year or two yet. I’ve taken blackcurrant cuttings from my plant at home, so I am hoping we can get those into the garden next year.
Tim, who cuts our grass, knows a lot about the flowers that grow wild in our garden. Technically these are weeds, or wild flowers depending on your viewpoint. We have lots of plants amongst the grass that we haven’t planted. Some have grown from stray seeds. Others, like the different clovers, have just appeared because they like to grow there. I think we need to put a wild flower spotter sheet in the garden so you can identify what is growing wild there. There are already lots of spotter sheets in the book tree for you to use when you are visiting the garden.
The Blooming Old Gardener