Treading lightly, one step at a time.
My name is Maria. Many of my earliest memories are to do with nature and plants. I remember travelling along a road through a forest in the middle of winter in Sweden and every time the moon glimpsed through the trees I would shout out in wonder “Look at the moon”. This annoyed my big … Read more About the author.
Over the last few years we have extended our old cottage, built a conservatory and are now in the process of renovating and improving our shed to use as a workshop and storage facility. Our aim is for our buildings to have as little negative impact as possible on the environment. We have used reclaimed … Read more Building our sustainable home.
Even before we bought our cottage and piece of land four year ago, we were planning our forest garden. Forest gardens exist all over the world and their history goes back for thousands of years. It is a way of growing mostly perennial vegetables, shrubs, trees, vines and other useful plants in a way that … Read more Gardening in harmony.
Our Open Garden weekend for Amnesty is over for this year. The sun that has been shining relentlessly on us for many weeks, decided not to make an appearance. Instead we got blustery; wet conditions much like last year. Our marquees were threatening to blow away and we had to bring out the six inch nails and the large roll of duct tape to make a few emergency repairs.
It is the eve of our open garden weekend and there are still lots of things to tend to. There are floors to sweep, furniture to move, the café area to organize further and many other last minute preparations.
Despite this we decided to walk around the garden for a while and take a few photos for sharing with you all here. We are so fortunate to have a place of our own; a garden full of food plants and beautiful flowers to delight us and all the wildlife that we share it with. It makes us feel tremendous gratitude.
Many millions of people around the world are not so fortunate. They have had to flee their homes and sometimes even their countries and it is because of this we decided to open our garden and home again this year in Support of Amnesty International Ireland and their #Iwelcome Refugees campaign.
We think it is important to support this campaign and we were owerwhelmed by the generosity of our visitors last year.
If you live locally we would be delighted to see you! You can read more about the event here.
We are just over a week into July and it is time to sum up the past month on the land. So much has happened in the garden. At the start of June plants were still catching up after the very late cold start to the season, but at the end of the month, they were starting to show signs of drought after weeks with next to no rain.
We have always had a weakness for roses. The fascination is partly with the scent, wafting through the warm air on a summer evening, partly with the sunlight shining through the petals and illuminating them as from within and partly with the numerous shapes and colours of the flowers.
It has been unusually warm here in the West of Ireland and one day last week we found ourselves close to the shores of Lough Key. We remembered a magical day a few years back when all six of us rented two rowing boats for a couple of hours and went for a picnic on a very special island, so we decided to recapture some of the magic of that day.
It has been a very busy month here at the Greener dream. We managed to finally get the window into the shed wall and now we are blessed with light in a space that has been completely dark since we moved in five years ago. All we have to do now is go through all the boxes of stuff that have accumulated in there and then we will have a nice work and storage space. We are planning to put in a new door as well with glass panels and one more window, so that even more light can flood into the space.
May is always a very busy month on the land. There are many seeds to sow, seedlings to transplant and plants that have a wish for world domination to keep in check. So a day away from the plot can be very uplifting and inspiring. But we would not wish to be too far from the natural world so spending such a day in a friend’s garden is a wonderful treat. We arrived for the first Open Garden Day this year at Carrick Gardens, Carrick Callow, County Mayo, armed with chocolate cake and comfortable shoes.
