The potpourri project: How to make a simple solar drier
Rose petals are an important ingredient in many potpourri mixtures. You can buy rose petals online at around £15.00 for 500g. That seemed like an awful lot of money until I started drying our own rose petals. I large rose weighing 150g produces approximately 10g of dried petals. I’ve also found these – 2 Ltrs of rose petals but am not sure how much 2 litres of rose petals actually weighs. Luckily, even though we dug up our long rose walk there were a lot of other roses dotted about the garden. Mainly French, climbing and...
read moreAmaryllis (indoor and hardy)
Now that’s a name to conjure with. I’ve never met anyone or even a pet called Amaryllis. I did know a girl called Primrose T. She had big bones and would galumph across the lacrosse field and score goal after goal. Not being a sporty type I was always relegated to the edge of the field where I could observe the hub of the game and rarely be tasked to join in. Oh the bliss of growing up and not having to endure school sports. I used to only grow white amaryllis but gradually I have begun to appreciate the huge range of colourful blooms...
read moreGreat Aunt Doris and Great Aunt Lillian. Flowers bring back old memories.
It must be 40 years since I last saw Aunt Doris and Aunt Lillian. When my mother married my stepfather he came with a great big pack of relations – Doris and Lillian were amongst my favourites. I first met these elderly aunts at the wedding reception. All I can remember about the event was that we ate Baked Alaska, I was wearing my first new shop bought dress and those Aunts. Aunt Doris peered at us and exclaimed “You are so thin – we’ll have to fatten you up!” From then on they were always referred to as The Thin Aunts. Both...
read moreHow to make potpourri: starting out
I’ve been interested in drying flowers since I started growing them in earnest this year. This would be a way of extending the ‘sales’ season and getting 100% out of the flowers. Recently a kind reader emailed me and suggested that I dried rose petals as confetti. This would be a great use of our old French climbing roses – these go over fairly quickly so I can only really sell them in bud. I had also been toying with they idea of making a range of really good potpourri – this could be sold all year and wouldn’t be expensive to...
read moreUpdate on the flower farming project
My project to grow and sell cut flowers is now getting exciting. We sold our first bunches this week to our local village shop.
read moreHow to make a temporary vase for cut flowers
I invested in Sarah Raven’s The Cutting Garden: Growing and Arranging Garden Flowers a while ago. It’s a brilliant inspirational book if you are raising flowers to cut for the house or to sell. A perfect reference guide. Recently I also bought her later book Grow Your Own Cut Flowers. This is a much simpler book than The Cutting Garden, listing just her favourite flowers and bulbs. But there are new tips and tricks and I’ve enjoyed lolling on the swing seat with the Min Pins and immersing myself in its pages. If I was going to...
read moreFlowers from our gate side stand: May 2010
I haven’t posted ‘Flowers from the garden’ for ages – mainly because almost everything is sold on the gate side stand. Come high summer our cottage will be filled with flowers from the garden as I have armies of annuals impatiently waiting in the wings for all likelihood of frosts to be over. At the moment commercialism triumphs over pleasure. We always put out fresh flowers so if a bunch is not snapped up within two days they are mine. A sort of jaded bliss – I’m supposed to be selling them after all. So I’m changing...
read moreHow to get the best from your lilies
I’m embarrassed to admit that until last week I didn’t know that most lilies prefer acid soil. I knew that most of them thrive in a well drained sunny site but I never investigated the soil aspect. Again I think that acquiring gardening knowledge is a time thing. No pack informs you that you need a slightly acid soil. Clearly, withholding this information will sell more bulbs. For the past 18 years I reckoned I had all the answers and planted my lily bulbs with gay abandon. Always with a decent layer of 5 cm of horticultural grit but...
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