April Cottage Garden Tour – Spring Meadow, Daffodils, Edible Garden & New Yew Border

Welcome back to our cottage garden. We just managed to squeeze in an April tour before the end of the month – come and see the beautiful blooms on our clematis and weigela plants, the start of our new yew hedging and our edible garden as it wakes up for the growing season.

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[Music] [Music] [Laughter] hello and welcome back to our Cottage Garden this is our April tour might be that you’re watching this in May because we’re filming it quite late we’re in the last week of April now um we were a bit late filming this month because we actually went on holiday and it was incredible um it’s delayed our work but it was so needed we haven’t been on holiday for eight years on a proper holiday so um it was amazing but now we’re back in the garden and a lot has changed since we last showed you round this time of year things are just growing so quickly and it feels like every day you can come out here and find something new um so it’s very exciting um and also such a relief to be able to say that it isn’t too rainy this this month um in the last few videos that I’ve made I think every single video I’ve been telling you it’s been super rainy um nice and cloudy and about 14° C here at the moment and some of you have asked what our hardiness zone is and we’re actually in about the equivalent of 9A here so it doesn’t get quite as cold in the winter as I know it does for some of you guys um who are over in the states and now that we’re into spring the Ducks are laying every day which is amazing we’re having omelets and eggs on bagels for breakfast um I love this time of year when you kind of start to get some produce from the garden it feels very rewarding whan our duck that was poorly has made a really really good recovery he seems absolutely fine so we’re really relieved um we put quite a lot of intensive work into rehabilitating him after he was attacked um so it’s really good that he’s on the menend now I thought I would start by showing you what’s in flower at the moment so down here we have our Claus Montana um I planted this one about 3 years ago and it’s a really good size now it’s been flowering for about a week with these beautiful soft pink flowers um it’s actually planted in quite Shady conditions down here and it does really really well um and I love the way it softens this stone wall and adds Something Beautiful um to an area that would otherwise not have any plants um it’s quite an aggressive grower so I do prune it a few times a year um if I didn’t do that it would completely swamp this wall um so it’s good to keep it in check back and then also behind me you can see that our forget me knots have started flowering and these are amazing they just self-seed all over the garden with not much help from me at all um occasionally I’ll shake the dried seed heads on bare patches of soil after they’ve gone over but for the most part they move themselves around really successfully and they flower for quite a long time and they are lovely you’ll see more of those um as we move up the garden too and our Rosemary is looking beautiful it’s got some pale blue flowers on at the moment as well the origon on the steps is just starting to come back to life I think it looks best um in a couple of months time in summer when it really swamps these steps there’s a few early flowers on there at the moment as well the most exciting thing down here though is our Wisteria behind me which I planted 5 years ago and I was actually planning to do a troubleshooting video with you guys to see if anyone could help me um figure out why it hasn’t flowered but it is going to flower this year which is amazing um Every Spring I come out here and check and I haven’t had any luck so far but we’ve got maybe about 15 buds on there now that are looking nice and big so in the next couple of weeks I expect to see that one flowering as well it’s a white Flora bunder Wist area so it should have really really long spires of flowers the idea of me planting it here was that it would look like a nice kind of waterfall um as it falls down this stone wall behind me um again semi-shade so not ideal for Wisteria it likes a bit of sun but thankfully it is enough sunlight that it will produce some flowers for us so I will show you that very soon when it flowers now let’s go up the garden and I will show you some other things that are in flower this area of the garden is looking really lovely at the moment we have our weila shrub in full bloom and I’m not sure you can hear it on the video but I can hear a constant hum from all the bees they are on there they really really love it and who can blame them um It’s a Wonderful plant I don’t know what the variety is because it was here when we moved in um but one of these things we’re really really grateful to whoever planted it before us it’s also a really good time of year for uh fresh new leaves on trees and we’ve got this smoke bush above me has these Gorgeous Tiny kind of limey leaves at the moment um and similarly behind me you might be able to see the oak tree and the ACA tree which have got this Lush new uh limey green growth on them I think it’s a really really beautiful time of year for the trees and it kind of looks almost a little bit autumnal where they’re kind of warmer colors as well you can see next to me we’ve got bits of cow parsley up now I do let this self seed around the garden a little bit in some areas I treat it as though it’s a weed and I dig it out um it’s kind of a hybrid approach for me and we’ve also got the daffodils just below me that are just going over now um so these ones down here are peblo which are the same variety I have grown in the mini Meadow if you watched our last video you would have seen those and we’ve also got a new variety to me that are called White Marvel and that’s a double P variety they are quite heavy flowers so they tend to droop over which I’m sort of less keen on I think I like to be able to see them while I’m walking around the garden but they’re beautiful nonetheless I think that might be my first experience growing a double petal daffodil um but I’m keen on trying more of this I think they’re a really amazing plant but now I’m going to show you something that’s a new project in the garden we have recently started planting a u hedge along these lower bits of the garden and it’s going to be done all at once because hedging is quite expensive and quite labor intensive as well um cleaning out the area that we’re going to be planting in so we’ve done about 10 m so far and we’ve got 14 U hedges in I think they’re about four or 5 foot tall so they’re quite a decent size and but it will take them a few years to fully pad out and look like a nice hedge um but we were just desperate for some more privacy in these lower parts of the garden um and this area was a mess it was really really full of self- sewn trees and just shrubs that got out of control so it was time that we kind of added a little bit more form here a little bit more privacy and the amazing thing about you is um it’s Evergreen I think it’s a really nice color for kind of Fading Into the background in the summer months being a darker Green in Winter though these Hedges will give us a bit more form as the plants around it die back for the season so they will give us a lot of value in the garden and their plants that can potentially live for hundreds if not thousands of years so they hopefully will stay here uh well beyond the extent of our lifetimes they’re really amazing plant and native to the area too which is helpful for the local Wildlife um but it has men We’ve Ended up with quite a lot of Border space where we’ve done clearing to get these hedges in so I think a trip to the Garden Center might be in order and this is quite a sunny border now I used to treat this as um semi-shade because the previous trees that we had in here created quite a big canopy and not a lot of light reached the soil but you can see now there’s a really decent amount of sun exposure on there so it’s kind of changed um what we can plant so I’ve popped a few roses in um we’ve still got the Japanese and enemies and the helbor um and and the alelia molus that we added last year um I also picked up some asers from um marjerie Fisher’s Garden which I went to visit last month um and there’s a really nice little Nursery attached to it so those should give us some lovely purple flowers when Autumn comes around hopefully just really excited to get this bit looking more organized and planned and then eventually I will also try and get some new Hedges on the side opposite um but it’s just going to take me a little while to get round to it it’s a long-term plan um and good to make a start on it this year we have really been struggling again with the Box moth caterpillars I think even worse than last year so I have been using a biological control I’ve been spraying them every fortnite but it hasn’t quite been enough and I’ve seen so many of the caterpillars and it seems like they kind of pick one hedge really Target it the one one hedge will become defoliated really quickly so we’ve had one casualty closer to the house that I think I might pull out doesn’t look like it’s going to recover very nicely um and then the larger ones I’m still really Keen to protect those if I can we’ll just have to see but it’s partly um another kind of push towards getting other hedges in the ground so when we do eventually lose these Hedges which I think is inevitable now we’ve got something else to fall back on and look after but next let’s go up the garden and have a look at the mini Meadow you can see the mini Meadow behind me has peaked and started to go over now um these daffodils have been absolutely amazing though they gave us four weeks of really really pristine flowers um so these are peblo and um I will soon be deadheading these so that they can divert their energy into the bulb and feed the bulb um ahead of the flowers next year um but we’ve also got the snakes head feries in here that have gone to the seed and I will be leaving these seed heads in in the hope that they spread um and continue to multiply over the years to come you can see as well we’ve got the wild Prim roses in here that I’m really really Keen to preserve and I love leaving parts of the grass unmown this time of year especially with these little daisies that you get popping up around I think they’re so pretty um and good for the insects too so the next stage for the mini Meadow is to just leave it untouched for a month or two let it grow really long you can see we’ve got some cow parsley popping up here and we’ve got the blue bells that are continuing to spread um and they’re still flowering so we’re going to leave it alone um I’ll dead head the daffodils just to tidy it up a bit but um it will get quite long and billowy and Luscious over the next few weeks I think something I’ve learned from doing the mini Meadow um with all of these daffodils and Stakes had feries is the value of other spring flowering bulbs and previously I focused a lot of my efforts on tulips and I think I’ve noticed that they are just a little bit too unreliable and then the flowers don’t last that long if you get a windy day or really sunny day they can fall apart quite quickly so I would really like to focus my energy in the next few years on daffodils experiment with growing some new varieties maybe naturalize some more in different areas of the garden um but I’ve just been absolutely so impressed by these I’m really really pleased and I can’t wait to see it again next year and next I’m going to quickly show you our tulips so a few tulips left in flower to share with you these are black hero um and then we had some other varieties in here that have been and gone and we mostly missed them while we were away on holiday these are really really beautiful but they don’t look like the healthiest of flowers they have a few blemishes on um and some of them look a little bit rotten as well I think it might be a sign that I need to rest this bed and not do tulips in here next year um which I will find quite tricky because I do love growing tulips especially these um double petal like kind of ruffled varieties um so I’m unsure what to do with this bed now I might potentially remove it and just turn it into lawn um not sure alternative being I rest it and plant something else here instead for a year or two but these are even though they don’t look great they’re so beautiful and the petals kind of have these scalloped edges and they’re really lovely color as well um the other thing we’re kind of considering in this area is whether it’s too shaded to really use it because we’ve got these new um hazel hurdles up against um the direction of the Sun so there’s quite a lot of shadow in here now now that we’re almost finished with our spring flowers though we can move up the garden and have a look at our efforts at growing food this year so here we are in the greenhouse where I’m getting most of my seeds started and you can see here I’ve potted on my tomatoes um it’s really warm in here it’s about 26° c um outside it’s about 11 or 12° C so does get very warm um which is really great for getting a good start on these tomato plants we’ve got about six different varieties of tomato um I have labeled some of them but not in a very organized way um as I usually do but I’ve got a couple of um cherry tomatoes in here I’ve got a couple of beef steak tomatoes and then some normal Tomatoes as well I will eventually be moving these into the poly tunnel um but for now they’re getting a head start in here and then once they’ve started to send their Roots at the bottom of these pots that’s probably when I’ll start transplanting them into the ground I’ve also started my other seeds in here so I’ve got some melons Nerium cucumbers and some corett and leaks too um I’m growing some Ed deame beans this year which is new to me but I’ve started them in the shed because if I grow any kind of beans or peas in here the mice will just eat them straight away and there’s absolutely no point in trying whereas in the shed I think they haven’t quite learned that they’re in there so fingers crossed they don’t get eaten I’ll also be in my French beans in the next couple of weeks as well in the raised bed here we’ve got some elephant garlic which I’m going to be harvesting probably in a month’s time it’s looking nice and Tall but now I can show you the poly tunnel where I am going to be planting the tomatoes once they’re ready so the poly tunnel is looking a bit like a food Forest at the moment um which is my style of growing I’m not really a neat lines kind of person I like to keep things in happy muddle um in sort of a poly culture and it’s coming to the end of our winter crop cycle now so all of the things that we’ve had in the ground like the um chard and the kale are all going to flow and getting ready to set seed for the next generation of plants um we can still Harvest from them though the leaves are still good we’ve got loads of different things in here at the moment we’ve got some leaks chard um some kale some purple sprouting broccoli um some dill parsley broad beans and I think that’s it for the way of annuals but aside from the kind of annual veg that I grow in here I’ve got a backbone of perennials and permanent plants so I have a grape vine that I’m going to be training onto this trellis and it’s just started making its way towards it now um and I bought this as a cutting in 2020 when all of the garden centers were closed and basically the only way to buy plants for a time was to buy cuttings from people so it’s taking me a while to get it established but it looks like it will um I don’t know if will fruit this year but it’s going to get some good coverage on the trellis at least then behind me we’ve got a dwarf cherry tree which I think I’m going to have to net so that the birds don’t eat the fruit this year um but that’s just finished flowering and started to produce tiny cherries for us um I leave the doors open and I let creatures come in and out and I see all sorts of predators in here from um black birds to toads and um wasps and partly the reason for leaving um the kale to go to flow is that it will ract predatory wasps that will Feast on the caterpillars that we try to eat next year’s kale so leaving things to go to seed is um beneficial for bringing in natural pest control and definitely something I would encourage you to do if you haven’t tried it before it’s beautiful even if um it doesn’t help with anything else but the idea is those perennial plants and permanent plants will form a kind of backbone that maintains the soil structure while the annuals come and go around them and I’ve got a little bit more to show you in the vegetable garden too the vegetable garden is looking quite wild and untied at the moment um I focus most of my efforts closer to the house and sometimes I just run out of time so I think it would potentially benefit from me spending a good afternoon here tidying things up a bit but um we’re in asparagus season now which is really really lovely um so we’ve got two beds of asparagus we’ve got an early variety and a later variety and we’re kind of at the point now where they’re both cropping um we love asparagus and this time of year we love to make a risoto with it it’s really tasty you can also see around me we’ve got the perennial onions which are getting ready to produce buls on the top we’ve got perennial kale and then we’ve got loads of uh Wilderness up here too so the forget me knots have self sewn um they’re beautiful natural ground cover um I think you can eat them I think people do use them to decorate cakes and things um not something I’ve ever done I just think they’re really lovely and then we’ve got some chives in here too which are just getting ready to flower and they are a beautiful flower when they come out in May and then we’ve got some rhubarb and some elephant garlic um so the Elephant Garlic is the only thing in here that isn’t perennial um I just needed a bit of extra space you can also see in the orchard behind me we have a little bit of Blossom left on our apple trees the cow parsley is starting to grow so in May it will become a really really Lush bowy just field of cow parsley um really really lovely and at the moment there are some blue bells that I added did I think I added them about 5 years ago um flowering underneath the apple trees too but blue bells seem to do really well here and they do spread um so that’s something that should also get better in the coming years and then last but not least we have some new plants to the Garden that I’m really excited to share with you so down here we’ve got about 15 new plants that were given to me by a relative um most of them are hostas and um they’re all a really good size and I think some of them will be able to be divided into a few smaller plants as well um but I haven’t really got a lot of experiened growing hosters I’ve got a couple of them dotted around but not much in the way of variety at all so this is really exciting for me and I think my plan with these is that I’m going to plant them around the pond it’s currently not an area that I’ve gardened at all and it’s quite wild um so it’ be really good to get some nice plants around there and I think CU they’re happy in part shade um they’ll be well suited to that spot as well um we’ve also got some ACA trees we’ve got some helbor a couple of ferns some lily of the valley um and a couple of U trees and an ivy as well so there’s loads here um that I can use to plant up the pond and although I’m not going to have time to do it today I will show it to you in a future video and I can’t wait to get started but thank you so much for watching today and if you’d like to see how the garden develops over the months and years be sure to subscribe and we will see you next time [Music] [Music]