wendyswonderlandgarden

I feel like it’s been a long dry and rather hot summer. If anyone says to me ‘we haven’t had a summer this year’ expect me to be cross. I struggle a lot with the hot weather (huge migraine trigger for me) and the constant watering of the garden has definitely been hurting my shoulders and the pain goes straight to my head! I live in the north of England where everyone thinks it rains non-stop, well this year it’s hardly rained all summer! Despite this I feel like the garden has mostly faired pretty well. I’ve done a lot of watering, I know people say you don’t need to water so much but I don’t work hard all year on a garden to let it die because I can’t be bothered!

So the roses have done well and I’ve had just one new one this year called Queen Bee (picture below) although if I see a Queen Elizabeth one I’ll be very tempted to buy one.

I’ve sown some plants from seeds that I’ve never tried before and some I do each year. The cosmos didn’t even germinate, the zinnia did but they were tiny plants and didn’t flower for long. My Ammi, sweetpeas, honeywort (cerinthe), verbena bonariensis (or as someone I follow on Twitter calls it verbena bananarama) and Tithonia have done really well. My sweet William and wallflowers have germinated well and hopefully will flower just as successfully.

Fruit wise we have strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cherries (actually the birds had them all), apples and tomatoes. We didn’t have such a big raspberry harvest this year but it has meant we didn’t need to give so many away as usually we have way more than we can eat or store!

My perennials have faired pretty well too.

As much as I normally love gardening I find this time of year I have such a long list of jobs to do in the garden getting it ready for winter including moving things, weeding, tidying and bulb planting that I don’t enjoy it as much because I’m just trying to complete my to do list. This year I also have 2 bags of bark chippings to spread, hoping this will reduce the need for so much watering in future dry summers.