It is Monday morning and we are contemplating the wonderful weekend we have just experienced. We opened our garden again this year in aid of Amnesty International Ireland. The word that mostly comes to mind regarding this year’s event is love.
June in retrospect.
One week of July is behind us and it is high time to write about the garden in June. We had a lot of warm and windy weather but not much rain and it took a long time for the annual vegetables to get established. It is still very dry compared to other years and we have spent quite a lot of time watering. The vegetables are finally beginning to put on some bulk.
Open Garden 2019.
It is getting close to the time of year when we usually open our garden to the public. For the last two years we have enjoyed having many visitors and collecting money for Amnesty International Ireland. This year we were considering not opening the garden as we have to do a lot of building work while the weather is warm. But over the last few months there has been a lot of interest and questions about it and we decided to open the garden anyway.
Photographs of endangered species
I just had to reblog this post from my daughter’s blog. She is on the Autism spectrum and used to be terrified of bees and bumblebees. It is wonderful to see her now, getting close up to these beautiful creatures. 🐝💚🐝
I used to have a fear of bees because I thought they might sting me. In order to overcome this fear I went outside with my camera to search for bees and take photographs of them on flowers. This helped me to stay calmer around bees because they won’t sting me randomly. Bees are very good pollinators and they take nectar from each flower. We have a lot of flowers in our garden and we wouldn’t want the population of bees to decrease and disappear.
Stupid people who spray chemicals all over the place are killing the bees and they are killing themselves.
From Gazebo to Pergola.
When we started to work planting our forest garden seven years ago there was nowhere covered outside to escape to in case of a shower. As we have plenty of showers in the West of Ireland, we remedied the situation by building an eco-friendly gazebo from materials that we had available. If you would like to make one for yourself you can find tips and instructions in this post.
May flowers.
May brought us a couple of weeks with next to no rain and then a ten day downpour. We have been busy in the garden, planting our vegetables and watering for the first couple of weeks and then tackling a few of our structures in need of updates. We will write more about them in the next couple of weeks.
In our conservatory we have two different passionfruit plants and this year our purple petal variety flowered for the first time along with the more common light green one. We have lots of small fruits forming already and maybe the season will be long and warm enough to actually get some tasty, ripe fruits later in the year.
A vintage dream.
For the last couple of days we have had almost constant rain and we decided it would be a good time to finish up the interior of our tree house so that friends and family can enjoy it. It has been a few years since we started building it and the large beautiful rowan that was growing next to it has since blown over in a storm. At the moment it has hops and a lovely climbing rose twining their shoots up the structure and the hazels are slowly growing up to replace the lost rowan.
