Recycled Eco Buildings and Wildlife Friendly Food Forest Garden. Mosaics and Glass Bottle Walls.
There is a saying around here that you can get four seasons in a day and it has certainly been true for some days in the past month. Wet snow, sleet, torrential rain, blazing sun and summer temperatures have all played a role in the very changeable weather of March.
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February was a busy time for all in the garden. The frogs were very busy down by the pond. For a few days their croaking could be heard in all corners of the garden and it was a delight to watch them.
It was quite cold all throughout the month of January here in the West of Ireland. The daffodils poked their heads up and a couple of them even started to turn yellow by the end of the month. The Hellebores flowered beautifully and we fed the birds a lot of nuts and seeds to keep them healthy and content.
As we look back on December we realize we did not spend a large amount of time in the garden. There were so many other things to tend to in the house and in our new conservatory. The days were not long, with darkness falling shortly after four in the afternoon and the light not returning until after eight in the morning.
It is almost time to close the door on another year in our little cottage. We are so happy to be able to live a simple life in the countryside, grow more and more of our own food and spend time in close connection with the soil. It is very gratifying to see the soil slowly improving as we add more organic matter to it. Our trees create their own mulch now and the land is changing into a very exciting place. Where there was only a field of creeping buttercups, we now have a multitude of useful plants and a wildlife haven.
November started off as a riot of colour in the garden and we were so happy and thankful to still be gathering the harvest. Our Ocas, Oxalis tuberosa, had a great year and we still have quite a few to harvest. This South American tuber is very versatile and has the benefit of not being affected by blight. It tastes slightly lemony and is wonderful drizzled with olive oil and roasted in the oven along with some kale, carrots, onions and rosemary from the garden. Read more
October saw a lot of sunshine and quite warm weather here in the West of Ireland. We have been busy finishing up work on our conservatory and have started to transform the space in front of it into a garden full of stones and colourful plants. We are blessed to have so many stones turning up in the soil whenever we dig a hole to plant a tree or shrub and our plan is to really show of their beauty in this space. There will be some paths snaking through the space, manly created from big flag stones with some gravel. Bigger stones and rocks will form built up areas in between the paths creating planting spaces for our many Japanese Acers and other plants that have lived in pots for the last few years.
September has drawn to a close but the glorious warm autumn sunshine is still present. We are looking back at a month full of colour in our forest garden..
As we are writing this the rain is streaming down the window and when we look back at the month of August we realize that we have had many days like today recently.
Our tomatoes that started off so promising have succumbed to the damp and are blackened by blight. Next year we will try to grow them in our new conservatory or maybe if we are lucky our planned poly-tunnel.
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.
thegreenerdream 