Welcome to the 2010 season.

Like all gardeners we’re looking forward to  - fingers crossed! – a much better summer this year. It has to be!

We have already begun our gardening year, even in the snows of January. We sow about 150 different pots of seeds between us in about 10 weeks. At first they sit demurely in their pots, tiny stalks with 2 – 4 leaves. Then, to start with, the odd pot fills with green shoots and needs pricking out. Then another and another and another, like an avalanche they come  and, before you know it, the shed is filled and the greenhouse is bursting with seed trays and modules. THEN we look up from delicately pricking out a pinch of Linaria triornithophora (which has amazingly turned into 86 plantlets!!) and earnestly agree that next year, we’ll sow fewer seeds. Yeah! Whatever!

So February slips away with icy fingers – you can’t prick out in gloves. March and April will be the busiest months of the year, as we have to clean and repot our current nursery stock, clean up the beds and borders and, oops, mustn’t forget to pot on and on those seedlings.

May will see the start of our ‘Open Season’ when we open regularly for the NGS. In June the Garden Visits start. We just love these days! People are so appreciative of all we have done and of the variety of plants we offer, that all the cold, hard, long days of the winter are worth it. Besides, it gives us a chance to do what we really love the best – talk plants.

Some of the groups who book opt to have home-made cakes and we always bake for our NGS days. We try to have a choice of 4 -5 varieties, so baking is a big part of the summer months for us, usually late into the evenings. There will be quite a challenge this year as we have a group from Vienna coming and anyone who has ever been there will know what gorgeous cakes they bake!

Although it’s pretty much non-stop all summer, there’s nothing quite like strolling down the paths on a bright, still, summer’s evening with the sun a spectacular orange-pink over the hill opposite. Everywhere you look there are flowers, some in bud with a promise of what’s to come, others in full bloom and others now withering.

Aaah well…………. time to start dead-heading!

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Link to KNRacing ... a different form of flower power !

Harrells Hardy Plants
Office, 15 Coxlea Close
Evesham, Worcs
WR11 4JS

This page was last updated on 30th June 2010

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