Our garden and allotment

This page is for some photos of the garden and the allotment.  We're about 200m above sea level, and on quite an exposed hill-top site facing out over Shropshire and Cheshire towards the mountains of Snowdonia.  Picturesque, but a bit challenging horticulturally!


This is the garden vegetable plot during the summer.  The flowers attract pollinating insects and also beneficial bugs like ladybirds and hoverflies, and they look good too.



And that's the ornamental part - though the tree is a pear ('Doyenne du Comice') and produced about 20kg of fruit in 2011.

This was our herb garden in the spring of 2011 - it's currently being redesigned and replanted (more details on the "projects" page), but the combination of perennials and biennial Digitalis is one of my favourites.

This was our front garden in July 2011 when the poppies - all self-seeded from last year - were at their best.  Hopefully the perennials will have filled out a bit more by summer 2012, to give a bit more structure, but the poppies will certainly be back.



My garden is also the inspiration for many of my photographs -  I was really pleased of this close-up of a bumblebee hovering next to one of the poppies.  The cluster of ladybirds under a raspberry leaf was a nice shot too.  

The garden can look a bit scruffy through the winter as I don't cut back the dead heads and stalks of the herbaceous plants, as these little creatures need places to shelter and hibernate.  I always move any found on plant debris I need to dispose of into the greenhouse for the winter.

Spring sunlight works well back-lighting the translucent petals of narcissi - in this case Narcissus 'Salome'
- the trumpet turns from golden through apricot to pink as the flower ages.

This cultivar is Narcissus 'Orangery'.



This spring (2012) I'm looking forward to seeing how well the sweetly-scented jonquil narcissi planted in the new herb garden area do.  They should look fantastic in April, following on from masses of Crocus (which are already showing their leaves), and followed by a mixture of Alliums.

I hope to find space for another apple tree or two in the front garden.  This is my early dessert apple "Discovery" which crops really heavily from the end of August (probably earlier further south or lower down the hill), but isn't a keeper.  "Winter Gem", sampled at the Reaseheath Apple Festival in October, is on my wish list. 



We're lucky to have an allotment just a short walk away.  

We've been cultivating this for three years now, and for the first two I used it mainly for my infamous potato trials, though we also grew onions, pumpkins and a very successful if unorthodox inter-cropping of sweetcorn and Brussels sprouts. 

Last year it was "spud free" and the potato crop moved to the back garden; the plan this year is to grow first earlies in the garden, and the second early and main crop potatoes on one third of the allotment, rotating the spud patches around the allotment from now on.

The site is, like the garden, high above sea level and quite exposed - in fact we really need to provide some wind protection to the allotment.  But at least it faces the warm south-west rather than cold north or east winds.

We need to keep the soil fertility up, and improve the structure as it's a bit "thin", so we add rotted horse manure and grow green manure crops like Hungarian Grazing Rye.  A pH test suggests that the soil is a bit more acid than would be ideal - the presence of the weed Sheep's Sorrel indicates much the same, so we'll be liming carefully to see if we can correct this.