Finally June is here. It is the loveliest month of the year, when finally the trees are dressed in their summer finery and the flowers starting to bloom. The old apple trees are giving a delightful display of fragile white blossoms, and bees buzz about singing their workers song. I let the old apple trees be instead of cutting their branches to give a higher yield, as they have long since earned their pension days and don't need to provide fruits for me anymore. Instead I collect their sour little fruit and leave them on the fields for the wild deer.
In my woodland garden the borders are filled with early summer perennials such as Jacob's ladder (Polemonium caeruleum) and Bleeding hearts (Lamprocapnos spectabilis), as well as my Rhododendron-hybrid Cunningham's White and my one magnolia Susan. I only have one of each, as sometimes it goes like this year that sadly the weather turned bad just as these came into flower, and within a day their blooms turned soggy and brown. Well, such is life...
Meanwhile back at the ranch (as we say) this years lambs have grown up enough to be allowed out to pasture. They seemed a bit confused by the transport, but not in let least stressed. Instead they happily skipped out of the trailer and onto the fields, enjoying the freedom of a beautiful all-you-can-eat buffet.
In the kitchen garden I added some extra cauliflower to the cabbage bed, as invariably there had opened up some gaps between the plants I planted last week. I practice crop rotation, which means that last year I had potatoes here in this section. I love having my own new potatoes and making potato salad of the blue/ purple ones, but oh my what a weed potatoes are! There are always some tiny ones left behind in the soil, no matter how carefully I try to dig them all up! So in the beginning of June I end up weeding the cabbage bed for potato seedlings...
After a proper weed and water, I put a mulch of composted organic horse manure to give the plants an extra oomph, and then I cover them with cabbage butterfly netting. I must say I love the new net I got by mail-order from the UK, its so much prettier than the traditional white fleece I use!
Have a great week!
