End of the sweet peas

People often ask me whether it is possible to grow cut flowers in Scotland - I try to supress the "well - yeah you donut- I'm doing it" response and warble on about the beautiful gardens in Scotland and so on. In fact it is easier to grow certain flowers in Scotland than anywhere else. Hardy annuals absolutely love it here - cool temperatures, masses of daylight and not too much of the bright sunshine that sends them into premature seed production. I have always been very proud if the fact that my sweetpeas are lusher than Sarah Raven's, though I have to admit that it is the climate and not any special talent, or feeding, or tying up.
This heatwave has negated all that - the sweetpeas have blustered into flowering madness, churning the flowers out and not worrying at all if their stems are only a couple of inches long. I have been unable to keep up with the full time job of picking and deadheading and I am now FED UP with them and shall be pulling up the plants tomorrow and replanting with seaholly seedlings for next year.
Today I have been painting the inside of my new office. It is an old St John's Ambulance - converted into a campervan in the 1970s and now here to be my office and encourage me to corall my mess to a place outside the house. The ambulance has been languishing in the drive for too long, and I have finally got round to painting over the brown plywood doors (with Farrow and Ball Cooking Apple Green no less) and chucking out the rather smelly foam cushions and curtains. It is fantastically well kitted out with masses of cupboards and storage - there are lots of bits of wood which I suspect make into tables or beds or something but I need someone with spacial sense to help me fit them together. I sort of imagine it as a calm green and gold oasis with lots of fabric covered boxfiles and an artistic looking pinboard. I expect that it will diminish into being a van filled with piles of paper within the month.

The testing area

One of the preconceptions about garden flowers is that they will not last as long as florist flowers. This could not be further from the truth - many garden flowers do not travel well packed into refrigerated lorries or aircraft holds for 24 hours without water and that is why florists don't have access to them, it is nothing to do with their vase life.
I test out vase life by putting each of the flowers that I sell in a stem vase or bottle and lining them up along the mantlepiece in our dining area. I don't use flower food and they are in an area which almost gets direct sun and which adjoins the kitchen so it is a good test of the minimum vase lifethat I can expect.
It is also one of the prettiest ways of displaying flowers - encouraging you to look at them individually. At the moment we have pink snapdragons (on day 8), marigolds, cornflowers, annual chrysanthgemums and rudbeckia ( on day 3) and alliums and rudbeckia green wizard (on day 14!)

Where HAVE all the customers gone?

A worrying hush has descended on the road - there has been no traffic for a couple of hours and today we have only had 3 - yes 3! - customers. What has happened?
Was the rain this morning enough to disrupt everyone's routine so that we are no longer on the run between France Farm farmshop and home?
Is no-one going out for dinner tonight? Is it no-one's birthday? Has everyone gone on holiday? Or has some wierd sciencefictiony happening pinned everyone in their homes?
If this carries on I shall have a VERY flowery house.

You can take this nature loving too far . . .

I think that I am going soft - once I used to be the scourge of slugs. In our last house I collected and stamped on 30,000 in one season - but last night when we spotted these 2 beauties climbing the wall outside the back door, I just left them be. I think of these as leopard slugs but don't actually know what type they are - they are about 4 inches long with markings like a leopard in light brown and black.
I should be keeping a tighter rein on the slugs - yesterday I planted out about 60 delphinium seedlings which should produce their first flowers next June. Delphiniums seem to be slugs favourite flowers so I shall have to make sure that they don't get into that raised bed.
We don't actually have much of a slug problem here (not in comparison to our last garden anyway - the business is called Snapdragon as that is one of the few plants that slugs don't eat) - I think it is because we used to have ducks and they spent their days rootling around eating slugs and slug eggs. The ducks were killed in the fox frenzy but as soon as our tadpoles have left the duck pool (to ruin the image this is a pink corner bath we took out of the bathroom here, luckily the field is now so overgrown you can no longer see it) I think that we shall get some more and put them out on slug patrol.

A cheeky carrot

I promised Katie that I would post this photo of her as a carrot but it wouldn't load up onto the Farmers Market post.
It also occurred to me that I should have mentioned the exhibitors at the Harrogate Gift Fair who impressed me with their attention to quality and their more innovative products. While I can't really justify stocking any of these things in my little shop, I really think that they are great.
http://www.littleblackduck.co.uk had really lovely suede accessories, I was particularly taken with the pencil case and roll - a very special present.
http://www.totallytartan.net exhibited beautiful cushions made from tartan blankets - very Scottish but not at all twee.
http://www.rachelbarker.com I really like this woman's ceramics, particularly the coriander mugs and jugs. She is going to be bringing out a range of plantpots in the near future so perhaps they would fit in with my flowers . . . .

The sun shone on the Farmers Market! It was great to see so many tourists obviously enjoying their holidays in sunny Scotland.

Zoe was our official photographer - here is Laura of Lucky Cat Soaps almost sold out and encouraging children to roll their own beeswax candles.

There were lots of strawberries and raspberries, pies, fish and Lomond Organics vegetables. There will be another market in October - more details nearer the time from www.scottishfarmersmarkets.co.uk/organisers/index.htm

Farmers market Callander

I rarely do farmers' markets any more but a new market is starting up in Callander and the first day is tomorrow - Station Road carpark 12-5. We shall be there with flowers, plants and a selection of handmade kneelers, lavender bags etc.
There seems to be going to be a number of small stalls there who don't generally do markets.
Lucky Cat Soaps will be there - they are one of the few properly organic soapmakers about - so it will be a chance to stock up on their wonderful soaps and bathbombs. I love the rose and geranium soap and there is also a very good gardeners' soap which has very fine pumice in it to get even the scruffiest hands clean.

Scottish Field

Today we have had a photographer from Scottish Field Magazine visiting (I'm sure that his photographs will not include rusting wheelbarrows and strangely decapitated cows) - he was very quick and calm, there was no standing around posing for 2 hours holding an increasingly heavy pair of secateurs as happened the last time.
My application form from the Soil Association also arrived so I shall have to spend an evening next week looking into exactly what needs to be done to get organic certification. There isn't a seperate section for cut flowers - they come under a general crop growing category and there is obviously a big difference between me and my raised beds and an arable farmer.
There are a few organic growers of vegetables who grow annual cut flowers on the side for local markets (cornflowers, marigolds, sunflowers) but there doesn't seem to be anyone growing organic perennials or bulbs so I expect that it will be a learning curve trying to fit what I do into an existing certification system. That said, the woman I spoke to at the Soil Assocation was very helpful and not dismissive at all - so things have obviously changed in the couple of years since I last spoke to them. The attitude then was that there wasn't really a market for organic flowers so they didn't have a set of standards.
What hasn't changed however is that it will cost the same for me to be registered as a farmer with 1000s of acres or a tomato grower with 100s of tunnels - at £425 + vat a year it is a serious amount of money. It must also take less time to inspect a small business than a large farm so the fee doesn't even reflect the work involved. There must be hundreds of small ethical, sustainable businesses that can't use the "organic" word because they can't justify the fee.

Friday flowers

This week we have the vibrant colours back - they seem to suit the hot weather - my favourite cut flower of the week is crocosmia "Lucifer" - much taller than the crocosmia that has escaped out of gardens and into the verges, and a much richer colour. It is a great cut flower - it looks architectural in a vase on its own, and is strong enough to work in a mixed bunch as well. It lasts about 10 days. We have a tiger lily that is about the same colour and they look great mixed with purple drumsick alliums in a coloured glass vase - very Venetian.

Harrogate Gift Fair

My Mum and I spent yesterday looking around the trade Gift and Design Fair at Harrogate.
The day was hot - the trains were delayed both ways due to hot signals and the air conditioning in the marquees wasn't working.
It was a long day but I have come home with lots of catalogues to work my way through - I am looking for good quality, good value, unusual vases and planters - and I think that I have come away with some good contacts.
The problem with relying on the main florist wholesaler - Country Baskets at Blochairn - is that every other florist in central Scotland is doing exactly the same and I do not want to be the same as every other florist!
That said - it would be very, very easy to buy the same as everyone else at Harrogate - many of the stalls looked the same - lots of repro french style enamelware and cheap gingham matress cushions, lots of goggle-eyed santas and snowmen, lots of hanging garlands .
The worst product that I saw was a bag that looked like a ready meal or cat food sachet - one of those foil ones that you rip the top off - filled with compost and a packet of seeds. The idea was that you tear off the top, sow the seeds and then water, waiting for your amazing crop. Firstly the look of the thing (off the shop hanger) was horrible, who wants to grow plants in something that looks like a cat food packet? Secondly the varieties thay had chosen - e.g. strawberries - don't grow well from seed. Thirdly, even if you do get your seed to germinate, it will need to be moved quickly from the small foil container, pricked out, potted on etc.and this is not mentioned on the instructions. I hate this type of product, people buy it for the £4.95 RRP and then give it a go, deciding that when it fails it is because thay can't grow things, rather than the dreadful design. What is worse, it will probably be a success and will be stocked in garden centres because it is a "gift product".
Seethe over - photo today is of Jasmine and Minou, now best friends and sharing a basket.

Black peony poppies

There are probably too many things in the cutting garden that I grow just because I love them - these black poppies are a great example - they are stunning - purple black sheeny petals above strong glaucous leaves, they make everyone gasp but they are a useless cut, as soom as the petals come out they drop.
Sarah Raven gets around this by cutting full blooms with the stems very short and then cramming them into a bowl of water with some chopped up seedheads - this does have its attractions, perhaps for a special dinner - but the reality is that floating flowers do not last well if they are directly in the water- the petals in contact with the water begin to rot very quickly. I also find that - with cats trying to drink the water and some suicidal flies - the glamorous arrangement soon looks seriously manky with decomposing petals floating in amongst a layer of fur and bodies.
I excuse my poppies by cutting the seedheads and drying them for Christmas things, but really that is just as excuse to have something so drop dead glamorous (and easy to grow) in the field.
I also harvest the seed - if anyone want some of the spares, as usual just let me know!

Bad hair day?

One of the new bulbs that I grew this year is an allium called "hair" - it is described in the catalogue as "unique" and as soon as it began to flower I was worried - wispy green shoots emerged from a bulbous deformed head, it looked like a mutant in the flower bed, as though someone had sprayed it with some genetically altering substance.
This week I decided I couldn't just leave it there and decided to cut it. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong - as a cut flower it looks fantastic, out of the garden it stops looking ill and starts looking "textural", it makes the drumstick alliums in the same vase look insipid. I have been putting it into most of the tied bunches I have done today and it also looks great on its own.
It is interesting how many of the flowers that look best cut (e.g. parrot tulips) look daft in the garden.

Lovely lilies

These lovely lillies are called Monte Negro - in real life they are darker and more burgundy than they appear in the photos.

Where I usually think that more scent is better in cut flowers, I do find that the exception is in lilies - what is wonderfully evocative in a garden, sweet scent drifting across the flower beds - can in a house, particularly if it is warm, become overpoweringly cloying. In the cutting beds I grow my lilies for colour and shape not scent.

The lilies have been particularly good this year - mainly because I did resist cutting most of them last year to give the bulbs a chance to bulk up - now they are being cut it is important to only take 2/3 of each stem, leaving the remainder to deliver nutrients back into the bulb for next year. The result is tall thick stems with up to 15 flowers on each - with Monte negro it only takes 3 stems to make a massive bunch.

Cutting Garden at Chenonceaux

The Chateau at Chenenceaux is full of spectacular flower arrangements - they are one of the attractions publicised in fliers, not just casual room decoration - on an amazingly lavish scale. As we were walking round I wondered how they could afford the towering vases with 100 white lilies - the answer is in the cutting garden in the grounds. This is full of neatly tended rows of flowers - all timed to bloom at the same time, one row after another - you could see the 4 rows of freshly cut lilies, now only 4" stems. The artichokes were about to flower and then after them it would be snapdragons then sunflowers, a changing parade with enough of each to make truly massive arrangements suitable for the enormous spaces.
It is obviously a time consuming garden - there were 4 gerdeners there when I visited and the sprinklers were whirring away in the 30+ degree heat.

Back and full of ideas

We got back from our holiday early this morning and despite the rain I have been raring to get things sorted all day.
We were staying in the Loire Valley, in a small village on the Indrois river, within easy visiting of all the chateaux and their gardens. For Euan and I it was a bit of a regression holiday - we both spent most of our childhood holidays in France and it was great to spend time with the girls doing things that we did as children. By the end of the holiday they were well trained at making coffee and going down to the boulangerie to buy pain-au-chocolate.
I took it all a bit further, buying them the DVDs of the first tv series of Little House on the Prarie which was my obsession when I was 8. The idea was that it would give them something to watch during afternoon siesta time but it turned out going much further into an elaborate role playing game which left us with supernaturally well behaved children who cleared the table and tidied their rooms without being asked. A great investment.
Our favourite visit (Children and adults) was to the Chaumont Garden Festival where show gardens are created which have to be innovative, to a theme and most importantly - have to last and develop over the season. The theme was Play in the Garden and there were gardens with water-squirting hopscotch, enormous inflatable balls to push around rails and spinning tables and chairs. It was all very interactive, spirited and miles from Chelsea.
Surrounding all this is absolutely fantastic planting - the photos above are of a large flower bed alongside a central path - it is exactly what I want to achieve in my flower arrangements - height, texture, colour, and some kind of airiness.
I think that the plants I love probably goes back to childhood as well - my parents first garden was regular grass paths between lots of rectangular flower beds planted with herbacous lupins, asters, delphiniums etc. and I remember loving that the flowers were taller than me. Now that I have come home after a short spell away everything seeme to have shot up - the plume poppy is 8 feet at least and sways around with stipa gigantea, some massive euphorbias and thalictrum aquifolia. I am completely dwarfed.