2016 already - Another attempt at blogging

This time last year I posted an new entry for 2015 fully intending to keep up to date, and suddenly its 2016 and I failed miserably. I had a lot of other commitments last year which meant blogging fell off the "To Do List" but happily this year, I have handed on several desk bound jobs to others so maybe if I am lucky, I will feel inclined to write again. The final push to get back to blogging came last night when for reasons only known to him, Ben at Higgledygarden.com started posting links on twitter to my old blog posts, much to my amazement, lots of people read them. So I suppose if people are interested, I will give it another go. 

The veg patch is 4 years old and technically it is only half a veg patch now, the other half has become a glorious year round (well almost) flower cutting patch. I love flowers and have learned, over the last couple of years at the apron strings of Georgie at Common Farm , how to go about growing to cover almost the entire year.

So what did I do last year, well all the usual stuff but also a plant sale to raise funds for Oakhaven Hospice . The big job of the summer was to try and grow as many flowers as I could for my silver wedding party. 

It began well, with hundreds of seeds germinating, but sadly the very cold spring of 2015 slowed everything down and I didn't get as many as I wanted. The most successful were Sunflowers and Zinnias. These would normally flower in late summer, but by leaving them in posts in the greenhouse I was able to force them to flower early.

They looked lovely but I didn't have enough for the tables. I managed to get a few vases full but that was all.

Luckily being friends with a flower farmer has its perks These beauties arrived from Common Farm a day or so before the event. 

I then arranged them into these little jam jar posies for all the tables.

They looked lovely and were all taken home by guests at the end of a very successful evening. 

Elsewhere at the growing end of the garden, a few things have been replaced. When I built the raised beds I used 2nd hand scaffold boards, some of which were already pretty old. Now a few have suffered being exposed to water, compost and bugs and one in particular was sporting a huge hole. 

When the beds were first built I was determined to have as much space as possible. The beds were therefore pretty big. I soon discovered that it had been a mistake to make them so big. A large area in the middle is unreachable without walking all over my carefully tended soil. I decided to split my huge bed into two smaller, more manageable one's. A quick search online and I found my favourite supplier of nice garden stuff had just what I needed and so without much fuss two new 6ft by 4ft raised beds were delivered by Harrod Horticultural  They were really easy to build and a day later one became two.

And finally for this post the greenhouse was in need of some new glass at the end of the summer. Jim was strimming in the gate area of the patch and managed to kick up a couple of bits of gravel. You can guess what happened next . 

Its amazing how may thousands of pieces a pane of glass can break into. it was impossible to pick them all up so we dug out the gravel and replaced it. 

No blog entry is complete without our lovely boy Gibson. Today is his fourth birthday so here he is relaxing after breakfast. 

I promise I will write more regularly.