We are almost a week into August and it is time to sum up a very fruitful month in the garden. July brought quite a lot of rain but also some sunshine and our berries thrived. Ripening this past month were blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, worcesterberries and a cross called jostaberries.
All of these make great crumbles, pies and jam but we are planning to use most of our harvest for making dried fruit leathers and smoothies. For the leathers we have invested in a food dehydrator called Excalibur. We are planning to use this for drying a lot of our produce from the garden, making dried tomatoes, apples, pears and plums. Drying in a dehydrator seals in a lot of the nutrients and makes the food easy to store without need for a fridge or freezer. You can read more about drying food in Martin Crawford and Caroline Aitken’s book, Food from your forest garden.
Our vegetables are growing well and lots of corn and tomatillos are starting to ripen. We ate some lovely globe artichokes and cardoons during the month and look forward to more of them in August.
In our circle the edges we repaired in spring seem to be holding out quite well against the couch grass and silverweed that are always on the look out to swamp the beds completely. We do like our crocosmia, Lucifer that has grown very big this year. We are planning to split it in autumn and plant a few more patches of it around the place. It is very good for covering the ground and competing with less wanted plants. Most of our plants have been planted at least one year now and it is exciting to see the garden starting to take shape around our circle with grasses, shrubs and trees.
East
South
West
North
Green has been dominant the past month with some beautiful flashes of flower colour in between.
Our newly split daylilies and sedums are doing well, we wrote about them last year in the post Beautiful edible perennials.
Our carrot planter is working very well and we can’t wait to taste all the different coloured carrots later in the year. We are hoping to keep them in the box for as long as possible to harvest them fresh, as we need them in the autumn.
To finish off we would like you to play a round of spot the cat. Does she not blend perfectly into her favourite place beneath our yard tree?
thegreenerdream 