Walled Garden Volunteers' Blog August 2025
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Cheery Orange Dahlia
Autumn has arrived early in the Walled Garden! (I know the BBC made a similar announcement last week, but I’m sure I thought of it first!)
It’s been lovely to enjoy long, sunny days for the summer holidays; but the heat has made things tricky for us in the Walled Garden. We’ve found ourselves carrying out tasks in early August which are usually reserved for cooler temperatures in September.
In the vegetable plot, the lettuces, radishes and beans have ‘bolted’, gone to seed and some only fit for the compost bin. Raspberries, strawberries and then the plums all ripened early, and then vanished! Maybe the birds were enjoying a good feast!
However, the experimental Cucamelons have produced a wonderful harvest! The flowers on the kiwi didn’t result in any fruit, but it was progress. We manged successfully to grow tomatoes And we reported on our apricot ‘crop’ last time; the hot weather has had benefits.
The August holidays are a time when many of the garden volunteers are away, and the garden ticks along. So, when in early July, we realised that the Knapweed in the Orchard was glorying in the sunshine, with masses of their purple flowers starting to form seed, for those gardeners still around it was all hands to the trowels and secateurs! To a certain extent, we can let the orchard look after itself, but at times, to maintain a balance in the plant mixture, intervention is needed, and other garden tasks had to be abandoned while we sorted it out.
The result is that the Orchard looks a bit trampled, but we’ve half-cropped it already now and hope to have the rest scythed much sooner than normal. Most plants have not reached the height they normally achieve.
Geoff has been spared his usual task of cutting the lawn, as it’s quietly fried. Instead, he’s had chance to renovate the benches, and smarten up the compost area.
Apart from at the vegetable plot, we’d removed our ‘leaky hose’ system from the flower borders a year or so ago, in attempts to use less water.
But the Garden has baked in the sun…
Thankfully, there’s no hosepipe ban in our area, so we’ve wheeled out the hose as early in the morning as we can manage, a couple of times in the week, to ‘spot water’ vulnerable plants; and gardeners have filled endless watering cans.
It’s been exhausting work and has taken us away from other tasks. We didn’t get around to removing the ‘water shoots’ on the orchard trees at the right time, and we’ve only just thinned out the apples and pears – our fruit trees are laden this year. We’ve already picked the ‘Arlingham Schoolboy’ apple… and we’ve never, ever seen so many crab apples on the Bonkers Border trees.
The wisteria at the pergola is flowering for a second time. Everything this year is a little haphazard!
Wisteria flowering for a second time!
Laden Crab apple
