It has been a very wet year here – there has been no need to install a watering system (yet) down on the potager. In fact, some of the crops have suffered due to the deluge of water from the skies, while others are loving every last drop.
Last year we had a bumper harvest of cherries – what a difference this year. They were tiny and lacking in numbers, such a disappointment. By this time last year we were harvesting baskets full of rosy tomatoes. This year, the plants that haven’t been attacked by blight are just producing green fruits now. The chilli plants are really struggling – only a handful of chillis on 5 surviving plants.
But luckily, other areas have come on in leaps and bounds. In the orchard we are currently having a bumper harvest of wonderful, large, lush, delicious strawberries.
 
The lillies were spectacular, so too are the gladioli and the plum trees are now groaning under the weight of the fruit. The ancient espalier apple and the pear trees are covered in riping jewels and the hedgerows are heaving with blackberries and sloes.
An area where we have had various degrees of success is with our beans. This year, no problem, I have just frozen over 5kgs from just a handful of plants. Unfortunately my sweetcorn bed has been used as a dust bath by the guineafowl so of the 50 seeds I planted I have approximately 20 plants growing with about half of these with fruit.
But we do have some new things that we have enjoyed or will enjoy this year. Our asparagus bed gave us some wonderful spears early in the year. We have some figs on our newly acquired fig tree which we may be able to eat later on in the year and we have discovered a number of plum type trees in our hedgerow with large very sweet purple pink fruits.
Unfortunately we seem to have lost one of our new coeur de pigeon cherry trees – I think it was attacked by a grub in the trunk. This is a disaster as we had originally planted two trees to balance out a number of views from various areas around the garden. The remaining tree is quite tall and it will be hard or expensive to replace the dead tree with another of the same size and stature.
All in all it has been an unusual year so far in the garden but I’m sure next year will be totally different – weatherwise and due to the fact that we now have a very happy and active bee hive with thousands of new pollinators around the garden!!
