Some Proper Photos For Once

Whenever I do an event, I always intend to take a load of arty photos of the flowers before I deliver them.  The reality, of course, is  that I’ve usually been up since five and am running late so rush out the door, remembering to chuck my Argos camera in the back of the van if I’m lucky. The snaps I end up with are fine as a record for me (you can usually spot a bouquet in the distance if you know what you’re looking for) but not really the sort of thing I’d want to use to advertise my product.

So it’s always lovely when the official photographer takes pictures of my flowers. The photos below are of a gorgeous wedding I did in September and were taken by Dorset wedding photographer Courtenay Hitchcock of Courtenay Photographic, who has kindly let me use them.

This one was – somewhat obviously – taken by me!

Decisions, Decisions

It’s the end of another season and time to make some decisions.

My problem has always been focussing. No matter how much I enjoy something, the minute I see someone doing something else even vaguely interesting, I’m all “Ooh, ooh, I wanna do that! No, that! Ooh, maybe that! No THAT!”

The problem with this flower-growing malarkey is that it’s a small industry and there is no established model to follow. When I first considered doing this, I envisaged a regular stall at several different farmers’ markets and JW Blooms flower stands at local shops. Now, after two years, I’ve realised I never want to do a stall again (WAY too much work for the rewards) and worked out that flower stands in shops are just stalls with people who don’t care about the product as much as I do overseeing – or more likely neglecting – them. I’ve also really got into the floristry side of things, which is great but also opens up even more possibilities making the decision even harder.

But space, time and finances are all limited and if I am to make a real go of this I have to decide where those limited resources are best directed, cross the others off the list and then just knuckle down.

I’m looking for more land, and whether I manage to find some could be what makes the decision for me. I hope so. I could do with escaping the big decisions.  After a long, hard summer of work, the small ones  are enough for now.

Quick Catch-Up

Been ridiculously busy.  A few reasons why:

No Dig, No Cry

Wednesday evening I rushed straight out after work to see Charles Dowding talk about his No Dig market garden business in Somerset. What Sarah Raven is to cut flowers, Charles is to No-Dig (although hopefully less sulky than Sarah revealed herself to be in the recent Sissinghurst series). When I first decided to go the No-Dig route, I was worried that adding that much organic matter would result in all leaf and no flower, so I emailed Charles to get his opinion. Despite not knowing me from Adam, he was very kind, readily imparting advice and wishing me luck and when, on Wednesday, I introduced myself to him he said he remembered me and was interested to hear how it was going.

Accompanying his talk was slide after slide of beautiful, pristine salad leaves and veg growing in crumbly, weed-free compost. Of course, we all do a bit of titivating when taking photos for public consumption but something about these photos made you believe that, yes, his place actually does look that fab. I didn’t know whether to be  inspired or depressed.

There was lots of “ooh-ing” and sideways commenting when the pictures first came up.  I can’t say I wouldn’t have joined in had I not been on my own and already sideways-commented often enough to make the woman next to me start edging her chair away. But although deeply impressed, at the same time a tiny little voice inside me was saying “Mine looks a bit like that! Mine’s like that! It is! It is! Miss! Miss! I can do that!”

So, OK, it doesn’t look EXACTLY like that – my paths still have annoying clumps of grass coming through if I don’t hoe down them regularly and the edges of the plot are messy and buttercuppy, with great piles of sort-of-composting debris and hoeings dumped along them, but the beds are more or less weed free, the compost dark and crumbly and the plants tall, strong and lush.

And assuming there’s no little team of elves coming out at night to do the work for me,  that must be down to them there mycorrhizae – cos it certainly isn’t me!

And When You Pick Them…

…They look like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What A Difference A Year Makes

May last year:

Yesterday:

 

Occasionally I am still overwhelmed by a wave of  blind panic that I’m not growing enough, that I won’t have anywhere near enough flowers to fulfil the promises I am making and that I will bankrupt myself by buying in flowers, which I will end up selling at a loss!

But then I think about how many blooms there were just a few weeks after the top picture was taken and compare it with the way the plot is looking now and I have to do a little jig!

A Couple Of Surprises…

..On the allotment recently. The first was under some overgrown grass that I was making a half-hearted effort at clearing:

 

Disappointingly, not a snake but - almost as exciting - a slow-worm! There were two of them, but I only managed to get a shot of one on my mobile before they disappeared, hopefully to somewhere romantic where they could get on with creating lots of slug-eating babies. They’re a protected species and apparently fall prey to domestic cats so I will leave that corner uncleared for a bit (the excuse I have been looking for) and keep my fingers crossed for them.

The other welcome surprise:

  

I suppose I shouldn’t have been that surprised that these tulips were out, as I’d noticed the previous week that they were budding up nicely. But in my defence, they are called Maytime, which sort of implies… Well, not the middle of April anyway. For selling, they should really have been picked still closed to give them the maximum vase life. But there was no way I was going to waste them, and besides the customers would need to see how fantastically fluorescently pink they were. So, after a night packed tightly in tall buckets to keep them straight, they looked like this:

 

And now they’re all gone until next year. It’s heart-wrenching stuff, this flower selling!

All Still To Come

When I lived in London I used to walk to the Tube through Victoria Park. Each year there would be “the day” – that moment when the sun would become warm enough to make you turn your face up to it and the magnolia trees lining the central avenue would burst into bloom. Just before Bethnal Green station there would be a run of daffodils and as I walked along it, every year without fail I would think, “It’s all still to come!”

The transition from winter to spring is always so sudden – especially this year when just a couple of weeks ago, there was a layer of snow over the garden. With an apparent click of the fingers, the mood changes – people smile, the air smells sweeter and the greens become lime and zingy. Everything is suddenly gorgeous! And yet all the fab things about summer – waking up to blinding sunlight, never shutting your back door, long evenings outside the pub, it being warm enough to sit in the garden in the dark - the things you’ve longed for for months on end, they’re all still to come. 

 

I sold my first posies of the year this morning. They were mostly hyacinths (‘White Pearl’, ‘Blue Pearl’ and the scarily bright ‘Jan de Bos’ ) so they were a bit short-stemmed and I could have done with some of the Iceland poppies on the allotment being ready to give more variation, but they smelt wonderful, I am confident they will last well and, most importantly, they sold!

All in all, not a bad start. And remembering what I had growing this time last year – i.e. zilch! – I was pretty pleased with myself.

And on top of that, it’s all still to come!

HOORAH!

And The Lesson For This Month…

..Snow is heavy!

 

 

I could kick myself. When I put the netting on the frame, I did it so I could unhook it  if necessary. So why didn’t it occur to me to take the netting down when snow was forecast?

Banjaxed And Bored

Yes, it’s pretty and, yes, why can’t we just enjoy it, but frankly more than a couple of days and the snow gets very boring. The jolly-ing effect on the nation  is of course great, especially when the sun streams down on the smiling shoppers from bright blue skies like it did on Saturday. But once Sunday gets here and you want to get on with stuff, it just becomes a pain.

My top priority at the moment is the polytunnel, still sitting in the field in soggy boxes with the ground too hard to dig.  I need it up soon - I really want to start sowing some seeds under cover this month. The antirrhinums and other slow-growing half-hardy annuals need an early start if I am to get anything more than a few weeks of flowers from them. And I want to sow some more sweet peas, as the autumn-sown plants down in the potting shed have frozen and defrosted so many times now that I’m not sure whether they’ll make it. Yes, I could sow stuff indoors, I suppose, but the erratic light levels you get on the windowsills means the seedlings are never as strong, retaining a certain legginess no matter how many times you pinch them out – and anyway, the potting compost is frozen solid.

So instead of getting on with sowing I’ve been getting organised. I’ve finally finished ordering seeds for this year and updated my reference chart (which I’m supposed to refer to constantly to get things right but which I normally only refer to try and work out why things went wrong), and there are some exciting new additions!

I’ve never grown tuberosas before – apparently they smell divine – but I’ve splashed out on a few bulbs, and I have also upped my lily collection. Both of these – in fact, most summer-flowering bulbs -are things that I could never have enough of but  they’re expensive to buy and with a bulb you get just the one flower a year, so it’s difficult to spend what little money I have on them when I could get a packet of cut-and-come-again seeds for the price of one bulb – no matter how much you tell yourself that in the long run they will be worth the extra outlay.

Polianthes tuberosa ‘The Pearl’

I’ve also managed to find some seeds for limonium latifolium – purple sea lavender – and orange carthamus, both of which I’ve been looking for ever since I first used them on my floristry course.

Limonium latifolium

 

 

                                                         Carthamus tinctorius ‘Goldtuft’

 

 

 

And, as part of my efforts to grow more perennials, I’ve ordered some seeds of Scabiosa ‘Fama’ – the perennial blue scabious you find in florists’ shops - to go with the fabulous tall annual pink and mauve scabious which were so successful last year.

       Scabiosa caucasia ‘Fama Blue’

And this is Didiscus caeruleus, a lovely blue, all the more valued for flowering late in the season when nearly everything else is red or orange.

                                                                                Didiscus caerulus

It’s all very exciting! And so now I’m sitting here hoping for rain in February – bizarre.