Sunday 18 July 2010

quite a few flowers






If I needed to pick for ten weddings and fifty orders tomorrow morning I'd be Ok as the gardens are bursting with flowers at the moment, - but apologies, camera problems continue to mean you only get a few snaps.

Someone asked me what I had in flower, so here goes for a brief list as I haven't enough photos to show for it, (though I did manage to get something up onto the home page of the website after a bit of struggling) but I'm bound to forget some things - in the cottage garden there are lots of things like different coloured knautias, scabiouses, alliums, still plenty of astrantias, phlox, roses, nigellas, and lots and lots more, then we move out and we have enormous pale yellow scented lilies, far too large to send out but all the local orders will be getting those this week, along with campanulas, different alliums, sweet peas galore (two buckets a day) lots of shrubby offerings, monardas, asters, sweet williams, purple eryngiums, crocosmias, achilleas, lots of lovely foliage in silvers and greens, plus lots I can't visualise as I sit by the computer, then on into the field and the hedged bit is totally bursting - from the top until I give up listing - francoas, sanguisorbas, crocosmias, asters, sweet wills, heleniums, hostas, nepetas, catanaches, astrantias, achilleas, eryngiums, ammis, cornflowers, scabios, snaps, more sweet peas, penstemons, more scabious and different astrantias, veronicas, veronicastrums, red, yellow and gold heleniums, rudbeckias, blue asters, bupleurum, larkspurs, campanulas, everlastings, golden rod, nicotiana, nigella... and out into cosmos, more larkspur, monardas, nolinias, stocks, phlox and more phlox, hydrangeas and more shrubby things, mints, macleayas...... more and out into the distant field where there are verbenas, rudbeckias, achilleas, larkspurs, sunflowers, calendula, dills, gyp, dahlias (but too many got eaten and it was toonlate to replacae them so they are a bit of a disaster) daisies in many forms....... All in all there are a lot of flowers, and for every flower there is a weed or two so there are many many weeds too. But now I am wondering if there will still be anything for the open day next month. Always something to worry about it seems.

I have a couple of WWOOFers arriving tomorrow, I've been a bit hesitant about taking WWOOFers on as some need a lot of guiding which is a bit time consuming, but it's al a leaning curve and I realise I am not good at instruction. For example two girls I had earlier in the year were very pleasant, one was a part time gardener already, the other was a seed scientist who needed a break. She had been studying seed science so I reckoned she probably knew a thing or two, she seemed to. So I put them onto sowing vegetables as I was a bit behind with that. I had already cleared the ground, they only needed to sow. I asked if they were OK with that and yes they knew what to do so I left them to it. Miraculously, I did not even get a single lettuce germinating, not even rocket, let alone parsley, coriander, parsnip, brassicas, nor anything else. I don't know if they sowed everything six feet deep or if they just didn't like my food or something and didn't actually sow a thing. So there is a bit of a hungry gap. I should have realised, the seed scientist has been working on how to slow the germination of seeds. I think she has succeeded.

A postal flower bride sweetly sent in thanks and photos the day after her wedding yesterday. Yes, bouquets and buttonholes by post do work fine to all those who worry about receiving them the day before the wedding. Though the groom did have his buttonhole on inside out......

And two months ago it was Hay Festival. And one of the jobs I did was to provide the flowers for Barclays Wealth hospitality house. I sort of knew as I did it that they would be beggars to pay. Everyone else pays up fine but I just had a feeling. It has taken many emails, several repeated long forms, more than a couple of invoices and god knows what else to get a small amount of money paid. Net time I put two noughts on the end, perhaps they would then recognise it as a bill.

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