July Cottage Garden | Homegrown Raspberry and Potato Harvest & Relaxing Summer Flowers Tour

Welcome back to our cottage garden in Somerset. It's mid-July now, I don't know where this year's going. Lots of exciting stuff going on in the garden. We've actually been on holiday for a week so we've come back and found a lot of stuff in flower so I'm really looking forward to showing you round. You can see the ducks are behind me enjoying the sunshine and they're having a lot of time outside at the moment which they're loving. So I think first I'll talk you through the flowers that we've got going on and then I'll show you some of the food that we've got as well. So in the front bit of the garden we've got loads of lavender. Some is a bit leggier than others. We've got some plants that we put in ourselves that are called hidcot. They're a really bright purple variety and they're looking nice and compact and there are a few hedges that were here when we moved in as well. Those I don't think have ever been pruned. I might have done them once a couple of years ago but they are very wild and free looking. We are leaving them in just because the bees love them and plants are quite expensive right now. Maybe one day we'll change those, who knows. And then all around the garden we've got roses flowering at the moment. I have actually made a video about these so I'll link to that above if you want to have a look at our roses in more detail. But some of them are flowering really nicely at the moment including Olivia Rose Austin, also the Generous Gardener and Compassion among other plants. And then we've also got a really lovely hydrangea that's flowering at the moment and I don't know the variety of this because it was here when we moved so if anyone can help me identify it I'd love to know. Please let us know what this is but it's a really beautiful white hydrangea. And that's more or less a brief summary of the lower parts of the garden so now I'm going to show you the flowers that we've got as we move higher up. So I also want to show you these plum trees that we have bordering the entire length of the first three gardens. I don't know how many trees there are exactly but there could be as many as 20. They're starting to show good signs of growing plums now and looking around there actually aren't that many of them this year. It usually just depends on the frost and whether the flowers get frosted off before they can start turning into fruit. So for some reason this tree was a bit more sheltered and it's covered in plums so I'm hoping we can get a few from that. We also lost our biggest plum tree in a storm that we had in the winter. The whole top just snapped off and it looks like it's recovering now but there won't be any fruit on that either. So I think we're just going to have a handful of them in the coming months but I'll show you those when they're ready and hopefully they'll be really tasty. Let's now move up the garden. So in this bed here I'm growing some dahlias and I'm also under this cloche growing some cuttings of perennial kale. These cuttings are going to go to Aaron's allotment. What we found at his allotment so far is there's very heavy slug damage so I'm hoping that using kind of sturdy perennial plants they'll have a bit of resilience against the slugs because that's what we find in the garden. So I think there's about nine cuttings in there. Looks like they've all rooted so that's really good and they haven't got too hot which is amazing I think because we're in part shade here. They're doing really well. I've got a couple of nasturtiums in here that I just had left over when I was planting the other seedlings so those might take over as a kind of ground cover as the rest of the plants start to grow taller and then I think there's about 11 dahlias in here as well. They are on the smaller side but I just keep reminding myself that these will be flowering all through October maybe even into November when we start getting really hard frosts then I'll have to lift them or cover them. I can't remember all of the varieties but I know there's a lot of dinner plate dahlias which are the really big ones. There was white perfection, cafe au lait, can't remember the name maybe pink perfection something along those lines and then there's some new ones as well there's wizard of oz, lavender perfection's in there somewhere. I don't know how many flowers we'll see from these and this is an area that they don't always do too well in because it is in part shade but I want to give it a go here because we don't actually have a lot of other space in the garden and also because I usually lift my dahlias after the frost I don't want to be disturbing the beds where I've got things like perennial tulip bulbs and daffodil bulbs so I use this as more of a working space where I'll clear it out when I'm done and use it for something else. I'd love to open up more beds in the garden where I do that sort of thing so over time that might be something that we do but for now this is where we grow dahlias and I hope that we get some flowers from these soon. I can see a few really tiny buds on some of them I have also pinched the dahlias out so they should be more robust plants oh hello see you later yeah so that is our dahlias and our kale cuttings and now I'm going to show you the borders in this part of the garden as well. This rose is generous gardener and I just to show you this one quickly because it wasn't flowering when I made my rose video and now we've got a good few flowers on there and they are stunning they're a lot more open than I expected as well I thought this was going to be a double petal variety with really tightly packed petals but they all have a center on display so that's really nice to see and good for the bees as well I've tidied up this plant a bit just because it was getting absolutely massive and it had sent up a few suckers as well so I cut off a few of the stems but not too much because you're not supposed to prune them in summer tied it in a little bit just to tidy it up but this is an amazing rose looking really healthy and I love it so these borders on either side of me are a little bit gappy at the moment because I've done some clearing and I've done some deadheading some weeding and they're a lot gappier than I expected so I have bought a few plants to fill the gaps we're on a pretty tight budget so I can't fill all of them but I've got a couple just to start so I've got this tree mallow and this is a compact tree mallow so it shouldn't get much bigger than this this is called Barnsley baby and it's got these gorgeous white and pale pink flowers it's looking a bit on the leggier side so I'm going to put it in the ground and then next spring I'll give it a hard prune just so it can be a bit more compact and packed more densely in a sort of shrub shape rather than a really long wispy thing that it is now I've got two of these they like full sun so I'm probably going to go for one on either side there's a good few gaps to choose from and then other than that these borders are looking a little bit sorry for themselves at the moment we've got some amazing clematis called blue angel and I've been deadheading that quite regularly so that it keeps flowering and that one flowers for a really long time big fan of that one I've got some I think they're perennial sunflowers I've forgotten the name so I'll find that out I bought these last year and I put some on either side so those should start to appear soon as they're more of like a late flowering thing but I've mentioned before my style of gardening I rely very heavily on spring and I love planting bulbs and that's where most of my interest lies so come this time of year I have the reverse pattern of the way most people garden I think in July people have really really lovely completely packed with flowers gardens in July whereas ours is a little bit on the scarce side but I have noticed that the foxgloves are self-seeding in a lot of the bare soil so it will fill itself with flowers over the coming years if we don't get up to speed with that ourselves plants are really expensive at the moment so we're just going slowly I'll probably ask my family for a few plants on my birthday and that will help pad out some space as well but again it's a marathon not a sprint so not too worried and this lambs ear plant is flowering really nicely at the moment I love this kind of silvery color and it has a really beautiful soft texture on the leaves as well and if you look closely it has tiny purple flowers and the bees are really big fans of those and this one spreads really rapidly as well a lot of people told me not to plant so many when we started but I'm glad that I did because we need to fill the space that's our main concern at the moment and I think over the years we might start to focus on refining things but while we're still in the early days filling the space is our priority but I'm a big fan of these and I love the color and I really like soft colors blue colors pink colors so I'm looking forward to putting these in this afternoon as well next to me here we've got our summer fruiting raspberries and these are all ready so I'm going to pick them and take them into the house I think this is our first lot of berries that will have actually made it to the house because with the strawberries we just sit outside and eat them but there's a good amount of these here so I'm going to go ahead and pick them there's still a few more left to ripen but I'd say most of them are ready now if anything they may have gone over a bit because we weren't harvesting them while we were on holiday so we'll probably eat these sooner rather than later and then with these raspberry canes after I've harvested the fruit the ones that have fruited this year will die I'll cut those back and then these new shoots I'll tie into this training wire tidy them up a bit over winter and then we can look forward to this area looking a bit more tidy after I've done that and that's one of my winter jobs in the winter I'm just focusing on like tidying up the garden that's an amazing amount of raspberries definitely the best harvest we've had since we moved in we had to cut the canes back last year because we were reshooting the polytunnel behind it so now they've had a good amount of time to get going again and I'm really looking forward to this being a regular thing I love raspberries and the taste just doesn't compare to the ones that you get in the supermarket so I'm going to put these in the fridge now because it's really hot out here we've got a heat wave at the moment and then I'm going to come back out and show you more of our food now we're in our polytunnel there's not as much going on in here as there usually is this time of year but we're finally ready to pull up our potatoes they finished flowering and now the plants are starting to die back so I'm going to go ahead and put a spade in and see what we can pull up see if they're looking good these actually are Christmas potatoes that were supposed to be harvested for Christmas last year but nothing happened and then come spring they all shot up out of the ground so we know they're still in there they have actually been a bit of a nuisance because I didn't plan for them to be in the ground I assumed that the rats had eaten them or the mice had eaten them that does sometimes happen but they're here so let's see if we can get any food from them just a small handful of potatoes here but these were never meant to be in the ground this time of year anyway and I really wanted to get the plants out I can't help but think with some of these if we left them in longer we might have got a decent harvest but I really want to use the space in the tunnel for things that will like the heat so there we go that will be a couple of dinners sorted as for everything else in the tunnel it's a bit of a mismatch at the moment we've got some tomatoes we've got a couple of pumpkin plants that I'm training outwards so they'll end up coming through the front door but they're just occupying some root space in the tunnel and acting as a sort of ground cover for the other things we've got peppers chili chamomile some brassicas that I think are broccoli they've been hit quite hard with the cabbage butterfly so not sure how those are going to fare in here should have covered them really and then we've got some dahlias and a couple of lemon trees but as you can see a lot of gaps to fill in the tunnel so I'm hopefully going to sow some seeds in here in the next few days and we can start getting the floor covered I'm going to show you the veg garden next not much has changed in this part of the garden since I last showed you around there's just a couple of new things to show you so I've added an artichoke plant into this bed here as I've explained before this part of the garden is mostly perennial plants so it's in the same bed as the rhubarb at the minute where there is empty space I've put things in like nasturtiums just to fill the gaps but ongoing the plan with this area is to have it as a perennial vegetable garden I've also filled this bed here with french beans they're dwarf french beans so they don't need a frame to support them they'll just be about 30 centimeters tall they've got a few flowers on at the moment been a bit nibbled by slugs and this part of the garden is suffering a little bit more than usual from the slug damage this year I think we had a really rainy week about two weeks ago and during that time they ate all of the tiny seedlings so I've also lost about 20 swede seedlings as well we'll see if they come back but they're looking very nibbled at the moment otherwise though everything in here that's perennial is doing really well the chives are looking amazing they've got some seed heads on now so I've been using those to plant some more chives along the edge of these raised beds and they're quite pretty they just look like paper cake cups full of seeds and you just tip them upside down sprinkle them around and hopefully we'll have more chives next year the walking onions are looking good I need to replant the bulb eels now they're looking really big and the perennial kale is doing amazingly and it has started to be eaten by cabbage butterfly which is what we expected so I think I will probably cover this soon just to protect the young plants but otherwise everything's looking good I'll show you a little bit in the orchard now we're getting to the time of year now where we cut the orchard back to the ground because the grass has gone really long and it's just gone to seed so we'll try and do that soon when we get some petrol for our streamer but for now it's quite overgrown I just wanted to show you the apple and pear trees though because it looks like it's going to be a good year for pears a better year than last year for apples though still not amazing we have got a few trees that aren't fruiting usually again that's just because the frost might have knocked the flowers off but sometimes they do just randomly take a rest but the pear tree is looking amazing last year we didn't have a great year for pears so it'll be good to have that this year fig trees looking good as well I don't think there's any figs on that I might have a closer look but that pretty much wraps up our garden tour for this week hope you've enjoyed and please hit subscribe if you want to see more we show you around our cottage garden quite regularly and you can watch us update it