Hampton Court

No this isn't my garden! Not this year anyway...

Yesterday afternoon Braveheart and I went for the first time to the Hampton Court Flower Show. It was baking hot with relatively little shade, and we drank two full bottles of water in the three and a half hours we were there. We were both covered in Factor 30 suncream so no burns, I'm pleased to report!

Most of our time in our garden this year has been spent on the vegetable garden, and all I have done for the flower beds is see what comes up, weed and water them and plant a few new plants. So I was hoping to get inspiration for ways we could develop our flower garden, and I was not disappointed.

We spent most of our time looking at the Show Gardens, and some time in the Rose tent, the Heritage Plants tent and the Flower tent. I had thought I would buy lots of plants, but in the end I decided that I had so many ideas, after looking at the show gardens, that I hadn't thought through for our garden that it wasn't the right time to buy. I was also afraid that with the current weather it would be difficult to get new plants established so I decided to wait till cooler, wetter conditions return.

We took 160 odd photos though, to capture planting schemes, colours and plants we liked, so here is a selection.

Jam Today

After a few weeks of collecting strawberries and trying to eat them all on my muesli of a morning, we had a huge glut, and I made 5lb of jam. We have also made strawberry pavlova and I still have some left to eat on my muesli, although they are nearly all finished now.

That doesn't matter though because.....

the raspberries are ripening! I'm still eating those on my muesli and I don't know if I'll get jam out of them, but it would be pretty cool if I did.

We've also been harvesting plenty of courgettes and sugar snap peas, which are delicious.

We also have some beautiful flowers - potatoes and runner beans:

The herb and salad beds are flourishing and we have salad leaves and wild rocket, coriander, parsley and chives.

Last weekend we picked 8.5 pints of elderflowers and we now have 5 gallons of elderflower, lemon and raisin wine fermenting in a big plastic bin. It's not very photogenic though!

I've even found the time to knit, and I've started a new project, a cardigan in DROPS Safran (a 100% fingering weight cotton). It seems perfect for the current weather, cool and fresh. It has a body in wave pattern (feather and fan) with a top and sleeves in garter stitch.