Our Diary and Log for 2011

Flowers of Hatch is open 7 days a week during the season (see below). We are open from dawn to dusk, if no-one is available to man the gate we operate an honesty box system. Instructions and picking equipment are provided! This said the dates below are for guidance, we have flowers until the first (severe) frost and some start coming before we officially open. The sunflower maze gets taller as the season progresses - for 5 year olds it will be above head high before the end of June!

Date	Activity
23rd April	Flowers of Hatch opens
14th July	Sunflower maze opens
24th October	Flowers of Hatch closes

2011 Blog entries

27th July N.B. The anticipated dates for the sunflower maze have not been met! Due to problems with pigeons and having to resow we don't anticipate having it open until late August - sorry about that. However the field is looking great and we have plenty of flowers and more coming. Fortunately the pigeons can't eat the view so that is as good as ever - why not enjoy it with a pic-nic!
We seem to have attracted a lot of media interest. Not sure how this will pan out but we promise not to let fame turn our heads.

20th March 2011 Blog starts here, will probably peter out in late May as things get frantic - but you never know. Well the sweet peas and Antirhinum are sown, the first sweet peas are 10cm tall and should go in next week or the week after. Currently they are tripping up anyone who walks across our decking in Shaftesbury. Over the winter we have been splitting and mulching perennials so we hope to have much more June colour especially this year. In general we will have more flowers and more varieties. Echinops, Veronica, Eryngium will all come on stream properly this year. I'll talk about some new annual varieties in a week or so when they are sown... 2010 Blog entries

15th July We at last have some decent rain.There are lots of flowers but after nearly a month's drought they are smaller than we would like. Plenty of decent cornflower, lavender, alstromeria and Yarrow (Achillea) but the sweet peas are mostly on short stems. Still the sweet peas look fine if you pick them 'long' with a bit of leaf and tendril.

The sunflower maze is the big casualty. This will not be open until the end of the month now. It will have the paths mown in this weekend but it is not even going to hide a six year old very well! Sorry.

The Echinacea, Cosmos, Marigolds and Echinops are just about to start and we have coloured sunflowers...

6th June.
Apologies for the hole in the blog but it has been a busy time. Three weeks after the late frost and things are looking a lot better. The Amaranthus and the African Daisy are growing back well, the zinnia sadly not so, however the nigella are taking up the space OK. We have lots of things starting to flower but also lots of weddings happening so I hope everyone is happy. The Ox-eye daisies are sparking up everywhere and the Campion is a pink sea so there is something worth having. The Knautia and Aquilegia provide a little more elegance if needed. The Delphiniums are definitely late but starting to come and so are the Sweet William Today I've sown Shasta Daisy, a white Echinacea, more Sweet William and some stocks which should add to the variety this time next year. Also I'm just about to buy some Centaurea Montana which will give us some blue colour for late May. (We have some Camassia but it is slow to develop any quantity) In the next week or so we will have Alstromeria (Peruvian Lily) and the Yarrows atarting up. Sweet peas in a couple of weeks - from here on in its the weeding thaat needs to be done....

16th May.
Bit of a disaster this week. The frost has taken out most of last weekend's work even though we fleeced as much as we could. This was the middle of May!! Other local growers have fared even worse - our local organic veg grower lost all their courgettes, the walled garden at Pyt house escaped - the power of warm brickwork! We will probably only have 20% of the zinnia and amaranthus. Plus something has been having a dig up round the African Daisy so we've lost a third of those and the rest look a bit ragged. We need now to think about how to re-arrange things so that we don't have lots of gaps for the weeds to take-over in some of our most prominent beds. Apart from standing around looking forlornly at the brown remains of our work we did get something done. The sunflower was drilled and after several of us stood around taking fruitless pot-shots at ravening rooks with the shot-gun - which does frighten them off - and having spread some decoy seed and put out a scarecrow (thank-you Sandie and Andrew) I think we'll be OK. The rain got to us before we could roll them but it has served the purpose of firming the soil anyway.

9th May.
Whoa! busy weekend - the busiest of the year probably, the big plant out. The flower field now contains: most of the antirhinum, the zinnia, the amaranthus the african daisies and some aster. Also the cornflower, cutting sunflower, larkspur and nigella (love in a mist) seeds are sown. This year I'm making much more of an effort with the cutting sunflower. They have been fleeced against the rooks and have some organic slug repellent applied. The sweet peas are a little worrying, there are some big gaps and we only have a few spare to fill them with. Sadie had a good hack at the weeds in some of the herb beds but from now the onslaught on the weeds must be relentless! Anyway we have the first Aquilegia and some Knautia joining the Alliums in flower, and plenty of Campion in the wild flower meadow if anyone wants to come and pick...

2nd May.
So we have had some of the rain we wanted - should have specified that it fall at night. Didn't get a lot of planting/sowing done today as the ground is really sticky and claggy. So instead we used the tractor to push in some fence posts. The hops that we put in last year are really growing away and will hopefully add some height and shade climbing over their new frame. Yesterday we found that rabbits had eaten well among our sweet pea seedlings. I had an urge to eat rabbit pie so far unfulfilled but they'd better watch it. Sprayed the sweet peas with 'grazers' which seems to work well - doesn't hurt anything but makes the plants taste bad - let them eat grass (or docks, or nettles....) Started hardening off some of the antirhinnum and amaranthus etc. We have alliums ready if anyone wants to come and pick - 3 for £1 for the medium/large ones 5 for £1 smaller ones! You'll see what we mean. Pick them just as they start breaking.

25th April.
Put in most of the remaining sweet peas. Sadie planted out the veronica and did a lot of mulching - the delphiniums are looking good. I put in the Dahlias, probably not enough Dahlias but we need to improve our storage techniques The willow 'hedge' is sprouting well (see earlier post) though some have been barked by rabbits. I still find willow almost mystical, the way a dead stick will come to life just pushed in the ground. Would have done more but the good weather prompted us to get out the paella pan and put it on the barbeque.

18th April.
Back after a longer than expeted holiday in France - no not the volcano a car breakdown! Still things are hotting up in the flower field, literally, since the weather was as good here as in Provence by all accounts. Aquilegia coming on and Alliums are budding up nicely. Put in another load of sweet peas - only 5 trays (480) left to go. Also tested the rotavator on existing beds (not ploughed and after adjusting the depth to near maximum cut got a really good result. I was able to plant 450 gladioli by simply pushing them in to the soil - saved hours of fork work. Sowed Cosmos and marigolds in trays and nigella in a tray of cut in half toilet roll tubes, nearly the last seeds for this year. Synopsis: looking good but could use a little rain

27th March.
The rotavator was put into action yesterday after some fiddling with the power take off shaft - assisted by our hugely capable friend Andrew and his array of workshop equipment. It did the job well - turning a badly ploughed strip into a patch of useable soil without seeming to break into a sweat. And so the first of this year's sweet peas are planted out. This is quite a red letter day each year, it means things are starting to look up for the summer. The Alliums are looking good although the rabbits are nibbling. We are still mulching some of the perennials but only in the teeth of opposition from the chickens - who think mulch should be dispersed liberally over paths plants and the world in general.

20th March.
Well it has been quite a big week for FoH. Our biggest investment to date, a tractor mounted rotavator arrived on Monday! (Picture to follow) Still haven't tried it out as of course today it rained all day and we didn't want to take the tractor onto the soft ground. So other work continued - sowing seeds mostly - Aster, Amaranthus, Molucella, more Aster and Zinnia - one large tray a night in that order. Started planting on the first Antirhinnums as well today, that is hard work on the shoulders.... To accomodate some of these new seeds some of the over-wintering perrenials had to be moved from the greenhouse to the decking at the front of the house - they are starting to grow away except for some sweet peas that had been mown down by slugs - We'll get the sods, anyway resowed no bother.

13th March.
Showed Hannah round the flower field today, she is getting married in June. It is an act of faith to believe anything will be growing I gestured vaguely at bits of bare looking earth with a few withered green shoots and tried to sound convinced that 'The Aquilegia will be there and the Delphiniums are just about to come through here, no really we are just waiting for them to show then we'll mulch round them....' Some things are starting to grow, the pyrethrums, yarrows and echinops (new this year) are all greening (or greying in the case of the echinops) up nicely We did do a lot of muck spreading, hopefully next weekend we'll plough this in where the sweet peas are destined to go. I'm queueing up a ploughing lesson as it's not as easy as it looks.

6th March.
Planted some cornus (dogwood) which should provide wonderful pink and green stems next winter and pushed in about 60 willow rods (it really is difficult to believe that a 10 inch piece of stick pushed in the ground will grow but they seem to mostly. The willow hedge should provide stems with decorative catkins and buds, again in the winter. According to the man from West Wales Willows, who was most helpful and has a wonderful website here