Everlasting Flower

Does exactly what its name suggests,  lasts for ages in a vase.  Love these flowers.

Picking Peas in August

 This year's topsy-turvy weather has brought a first - picking peas in August.  Normally they would be finished by now, but surprisingly this year we picked the first courgettes before the peas.  They are still flowering so we will have more, but the crop will be nowhere as good as normal.

 Conversely, the outdoor tomatoes have done well, with lots of fruits maturing.  These are Totem, a reliable bush variety.

 An experiment for this year was this heritage variety - snowberry.  Small fruits on a cordon bush, which ripen to yellow, not red.  We have a few trusses maturing, they are very tasty.

 The garlic has been poor, but it did go in late. Usable but not as good as I would have liked.

While I was digging up some potatoes in a particularly weedy patch, I saw a flash of orange which turned out to be the belly of this newt.  It's been years since I've seen one, and he must have been hunting slugs among the potatoes. I released him nearby to carry on his good work!

Wentworth Castle 18th Century Park and Gardens

 

Wentworth Castle Park was laid out in the early 18th Century and is a great example of early landscaping.  The house was built at the same time, the gardens, park and surrounding areas such as the walled kitchen garden are slowly being restored.

 

 The park is extensive and contains two kinds of deer - fallow deer are in this photo if you look carefully!

 Red deer are just about visible in the distance here.  They help to manicure the trees, which all have very flat bottoms.

 The house is built on a hill and at the bottom of the slope is an area called the serpentine where artificial lakes were created, designed to look like a river.  After an absence of maintenance over many years, they lack their former glory.  Here you can see how trees have grown into the ponds.

 This one has a lot of muddy water in it but is rather unkempt.  Hopefully they will be able to improve it in future years.

 This is the Rotunda, said to be based on the Temple of Vesta in Rome.  It is way across the park from the house, and recently restored to its original appearance.

 The house was used as a military hospital during the Second World War, and some soldiers were apparently fit enough to walk over here and commemorate their visit...

 The laurel wreath on the back of the monument gives the construction date as 1746.

 A double avenue of trees leads back to the house which is just over the horizon.   This avenue was almost entirely removed by agriculture, and was restored in the last ten years both by planting new trees which you can clearly see here, and by moving semi-mature trees from elsewhere on the estate.  This is exactly what the 18th century landscape gardeners did, but without machine power!  So the large trees you can see here did not start life in this spot but were dug up by a kind of tree scoop and replanted.  Very impressive.

 While some areas of the gardens at the house are rather wild and overgrown (a work in progress), others are more formalised.

 Large drifts of planting are very effective.

 I think this is very effective, with the white and pink side by side.

 This flower garden is not original but formed out of an old car park, just a few years ago.

 No 18th century house would be complete without a ha-ha, and this one is no exception.  Invisible from the house, it keeps those pesky sheep at a distance and stops them peering in the windows! 

 This Victorian themed garden has lovely displays of contrasting flowers and foliage, with chocolate leaved dahlias contrasting with other plants including yellow chard.

 An inscription on another garden monument commemorates Lady Wortley-Montague, who introduced a smallpox inoculation technique into the country in the early 18th century.  This technique was used to inoculate Jenner, who later developed the process of vaccination. 

 Down a long hill from the monument back to the house is this lovely avenue of lime trees, much bigger than they look in the photo, most beautiful.

 The final part of the tour was the Victorian conservatory.  It is spacious and not over-planted, as it is used for weddings.

 While everything in the photo looks like it has been here a hundred years, all is not what it seems.  The tiles were made and placed recently based on photos of the originals.  The conservatory fell into disrepair and became dangerous.

Following a public appeal it was dismantled and taken away for restoration which took months.  Can you imagine the complexity of that process?  They first had to figure out exactly how it was constructed, then make replacement parts for the missing/damaged bits, restore the surviving parts and then reconstruct it.  An amazing achievement.

Wentworth Park is near Barnsley in South Yorkshire.  The park is extensive and good shoes are required, the full walk round is about 4 miles but you can walk smaller sections.  There are lots of butterflies, deer and some nice flowers in summer.  In spring I believe the azalea garden is good, and they do have a lot of rhododendrons so a spring visit may be worthwhile.

2016 - A Strange Weather Year

 2016 has been the weirdest year for weather.  The temperature in December was higher than in April, and of course we had a very wet winter, culminating in serious flooding.  This New Dawn rose was 3 feet under water, yet survived intact and has flowered later and for longer than normal. It has been flowering for a month now, and is putting out lots of new shoots, so the flooding seems to have been beneficial.

 Everything has been late this year, with poor germination and pollination generally.  Only about 60% of the broad beans germinated, all the runner beans failed and I had to resow the peas due to germination failure.  I thing this was due to exceptionally heavy rain and low temperatures at the time.  There are still broad beans to pick and the peas haven't yet produced full pods, which is extraordinary for the end of July.

 Everything seemed to hinge on when exactly things flowered/were sown and the temperatures at the time.  The Blackcurrants did well, they flowered before the redcurrants above which didn't set as well but not too badly.  The last to flower of the soft fruit were the whitecurrants, which hit a very cold spell and have produced almost nothing.

 The potatoes haven't minded the weather though, with the main crops almost ready for picking.  Likewise the garlic, which likes a bit of cold at the start, has done well and looks to be a good crop.

 Beetroot are very susceptible to temperature and soil humidity, but I managed to sow them in a warm dry period, with temperature well into 20s centigrade and they are doing well.

 The plums bizarrely started to flower in snow, which worried me, but only a week later the temperature was 25 degrees, so the bulk of the blossom set well.  The apples were later and caught the next cold spell.  I went to thin them and found I didn't need to.  I took around 6 apples off 3 trees, even the always prolific Katy has very few fruits.

 You can actually see the effects of the weather on the trees.  Some branches flowered earlier than others, so what I have found this year is that I have entire branches without fruit, and a sprinkling on others.

 I haven't grown early potatoes for a few years, but this year I decided to put in some Charlotte for an early crop.   They did quite well despite the weather.

 Like the beetroot, I managed to get the carrots in during a warm dry spell, and you can just see them under the mesh here.  Should be a good crop.



 

I sowed some cut flowers, but germination was fitful and wood pigeons took a liking to the cornflowers.  But they are growing now and I have picked the first few.  Another new plant this year is a heritage tomato, called Snowberry, which has just produced its first yellow fruit.  Very pretty, looking forward to tasting it!



From Winter to Spring in One Week

 

This was the scene a week ago, two days with snowfall and frost.  We've had such a cold spring.

One week on, we are wearing short sleeves and the temperatures are 10 degrees centigrade higher.  Lots of things are loving it, such as these narcissus.

 Everything is growing very fast now, these apple blossom buds were barely there last week, they will be out this week.

 The plum tree started flowering in the snow, which worried me, last year the late frosts killed a lot of blossom.  But happily it saved most of its flowers until this week, so I am anticipating lots of fruit this year.

 The strawberries are growing on too, with the first flower buds visible.

I have a lot of catching up to do now after the slow spring, today I planted out courgettes, pumpkins, marrows and lettuce which were all started indoors.  Lots more to plant this week.