Part Three – Autumn
The kitchen is the room in which we spend most of our time when we’re not working but it doesn’t have the prettiest view. We overlook a grain store and other agricultural outbuildings, which doesn’t bother us, indeed we are quite envious because we’d love some large outbuildings ourselves, but we do think we can improve the view by making the kitchen garden look more attractive. The kitchen opens onto a wide terrace and I’ve always had lots of flowers in pots, but it can be hard to find time to water them all individually in hot weather when we have other parts of the garden to keep watered too, particularly the vegetable gardens which take priority. I hit on the idea of walling off one of the two curved ‘bays’ to make a flowerbed instead and went around looking for old bricks. Luckily there were plenty lying around in various parts of the garden so I spent a few hours knocking off the mortar that was stuck to them so they could be re-used. Most of the bricks I found were quite old because they were irregularly shaped, solid and really heavy so not the easiest things for the first- time bricklayer to use. I think he did well though.
The finished bed, planted up with Hannah’s much-loved dahlias that she digs up and stores over winter each year
Fencing continued apace and we began to replace hundreds of metres of temporary electric fencing with more solid post and stock wire.
Hannah grew carrots for the first time and was pleased with the results.
Finally, we are lucky enough to have hedgehogs trundling about in the evenings.
Foxglove Farm 