Recycled Eco Buildings and Wildlife Friendly Food Forest Garden. Mosaics and Glass Bottle Walls.
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.
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.
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.
We were delighted to find that a friend had posted this excellent video from National Geographic on Facebook recently. It showcases the work of Martin Crawford, a Forest Garden pioneer and a huge inspiration to us for the last eight years.
A third of March is already gone and it is high time we sum up the last month on the land. February was very mild and lots of plants are putting on substantial growth already. Our kale plants from last year are doing great and we are harvesting small fresh leaves for stir-fries and smoothies on a regular basis.
Today we have something to celebrate. This is our 200th blog post and we are just as excited about our garden and eco-buildings as we were when we started writing about them back in 2015.
The first part of January was unseasonably mild and we were quite worried as many buds on trees and shrubs started to swell and lots of flowers burst open much too early in the season.
Pulmonaria.
When I moved from Sweden to Ireland in 2004 I was most struck by the lack of winter. Coming from a place of snow, ice and soil sometimes frozen solid for months on end, I was amazed when the last leaves falling off the trees and the last flowers of the year were met by hellebores, snowdrops and daffodils without so much as a snowflake to separate them. Read more
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