This spring has made my heart flutter! My wild flower area makes me feel like I am in Alice in Wonderland…they are stretching so high up that don’t know if they will ever stop growing! or am I shrinking!?

Those late nights of getting into the garden at the start of spring with my torch and my bucket of vinegar to collect all the slugs now finally seems worth it !!

I tend to go for the more “wild garden” so I leave my flower patch free to self seed. I also collect and seed save to expand the flower bed area but I do enjoy seeing flowers just popping up on their own accord when the conditions for them are just right.
All the flowers I have growing in my garden this year have either self seeded or seed saved from the end of the summer at the start of this year.

This year I grew these flowers again from seed collected – cosmos, marigolds( lots of varieties ) , dark purple sweet peas, to name a few. These are the flowers I want to keep producing year after year for natural colouring colour workshops.

Last year I grew from seed a dark purple pincushion variety, I obviously planted them out to close to the heat of summer as they did not flower at all and would wilt every day in the sun.

I ripped them out during the heat of summer to stress them and plonked them in a new garden bed with a richer soil and more of a natural run off collection from the few rains we get.

I honestly did not think they would survive, or take off again as they died right back. But near the end of winter, start of spring this year new shoots just kept coming on the daily. And now they have taken over the whole garden space where the winter veggies have now been harvested and consumed.

I counted almost close of 100 pincushion flower heads before I got distracted by something else in the garden.

I am also collecting baskets of marigolds on the daily to string up to dry for natural dye kits & workshops.

Still lots of work I am doing everyday to tend to the garden during this growth. Lots of bamboo structures for the climbers. Liquid fertilising to ensure a good continuous harvest of beautiful botanicals. And of course the never ending weeding!

Happy gardening fellow green thumbs.

xx Cheri.