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- For something different, let's look at no-dig flowers.
I love growing flowers,
ornamental plants for their beauty of color and form
and fragrance.
So, I want to show you some examples here at Homeacres
at this time of year when
there's probably more than any other time
in early summer, mid-June,
and no-dig, so no-dig flowers,
it's like growing no-dig vegetables.
There's simple mulch on the surface of compost,
where I'm putting maybe an inch a year,
five centimeters, just to cover, to feed the soil,
and that gives lovely, strong, vibrant,
healthy plants with great foliage and stunning blooms.
Nature does it as well, just not quite so dramatically.
So here we have grasses in flower and the elder bush
and all this kind of thing.
It's just this time of year and a lot of insects.
So I'm going to point out a few of the cultivated flowers
that I'm growing here,
mention why I grow them, and some of their qualities,
like for example, foxglove is really easy in this climate.
It can even be perennial.
This one's more biannual.
You sow it one year, and flower the next.
One thing I do with the foxgloves
is when they finish flowering,
I cut out the stem with all the potential seed heads on,
because otherwise that will drop like a million seeds
and you'll have foxgloves everywhere,
and okay, maybe that would sound really nice,
but with all these things, moderation is definitely good.
You just want a few.
You can see there's not actually many foxgloves here,
just to get really good blooms.
So if plants do go to seed like that and drop a lot of seed,
you want to be in the spring hoeing or weeding selectively,
and just choose the strongest.
Another example of that here is Alchemilla mollis.
So, beautiful, feathery yellow blossom at this time of year
and by late summer that will all go brown.
These will turn into seed heads.
So before that happens too much,
we cut the plant right to ground level.
I'll take that to the compost heap,
stop it seeding everywhere, or too many, anyway,
and then you'll get lovely, healthy foliage
for the rest of the year.
And this one will pretty much grow in concrete.
It's almost doing that on the edge of the bed here.
And then we have a standby favorite in this oceanic climate,
geraniums, all kinds,
and this one I've read,
I don't know the Latin name of.
It's one that I was given.
It's a very reliable plant in terms of flowering all summer
with these pretty flowers,
and behind it is another nice perennial,
commonly known as lamb's ears because of these gorgeous,
soft feathery leaves.
And that's actually flowering at the moment.
The flowers are not obvious, but they're much liked by bees.
You nearly always see a lot of insects on lamb's ears
at this time of year.
And this is Hemerocallis, which commonly known as day lily.
So that name comes from the fact that these flowers
do only last a day, a lily of a day.
They're not actually lilies.
They're of a different family, Hemerocallis,
but they look like lilies,
so that's where the name comes from.
And they're very nice to eat as well as to admire.
And finally, here is this gorgeous rose, De Rescht.
It's a very old one.
Nobody quite knows its origins.
It's such an old cultivar and it's a shrub rose,
so it doesn't ever get much bigger than that.
If you want just one easy to look after rose in your garden,
De Rescht, you could do worse,
and this will flower for most of the summer,
so you just need to keep taking out
the finished buds like that,
and you got little clusters where you get more coming
after you keep removing the dead ones.
So that goes on for a long time.
And we can have a look at some more lovely things
down here as well.
I find it amazing to look at this garden now
because when I arrived here 5-1/2 years ago,
this was very wild and weedy,
and there were woody weeds as well, like brambles and ivy.
The ivy, we pulled out,
brambles, I took a sharp spade to dig out the central clump.
So there's a little bit of digging involved in no-dig,
and for the rest of it,
it was pulling the perennial weeds that keep growing.
Like, for example,
I just noticed one that we missed last week.
We go through these borders about once a week
to just pull out any weeds we see.
There's not a lot growing here now.
The ground's pretty clean, and the bindweed,
though, has survived.
And on that rose, I've just spotted, actually,
quite a big stem or two of bindweed growing up it,
so I'll get in with a trowel underneath
and lever out what I can of the root,
but you never really get rid of it,
but you just have to keep on top of it
and not let it get strong again.
Here is a flower which survived
that initial mulching process.
It had a big 10-ton load of compost on it, actually, here,
and it's a peony.
So peonies are a great for early summer blooms,
and then they finish.
They're just one month at the most.
Cut them down and they just sort of get leaves
for the rest of the summer
and flower again the following year.
Very perennial in this climate.
And this is sea holly,
which is a lovely flower because it
comes much later in the year.
It's really good to have a range of flowers
at different times of year.
It's very easy to fill your garden with flowers
in early summer,
but this one comes late summer.
So July, August, September,
and then these also make seeds rather like the foxglove.
So I'm always looking to remove the heads before they set.
and drop too many seeds.
I mean, this one has self-sown there.
Here's a gorgeous rose called Golden Celebration,
which is particularly aromatic,
so I'm getting a lovely waft of scent here.
All roses have different qualities,
and have fun choosing one or two
because you'll find one that suits your wishes
in terms of size and color and scent.
Sweet lilies also have, sorry,
Sweet Williams have a beautiful scent,
So that's Dianthus,
and they flower early summer
from being sown in the year before.
So you can sow them about now June, July, mid-summer,
plant them in the autumn,
and they flower the following spring.
Although these are actually perennial,
'cause in our climate,
sometimes they survive the winter if it's not too cold.
As do these salvias.
That's Salvia jamensis,
and you can see the gorgeous
and very fragrant little red flowers
that really brighten up the garden.
If you just have one of those surrounded by green,
it looks really nice.
Along here, I've planted some lavender and other flowers
and they're all complementing the apple trees.
So these apple trees are over five years old
and they haven't got very big
'cause they're on semi-dwarfing rootstock.
That's M9.
I will keep them to about that size, now, by pruning,
Certainly not taller than me.
That makes it very manageable.
And it also means, 'cause they're not so vigorous,
we've extended the border a bit this way.
We actually just put cardboard on the grass and weeds
and compost on top and then planted into that.
Two years ago, we started that here,
planted lavender, for example, and these sweet peas,
which are annuals.
The lavender's perennial,
sweet peas, you have to sow every spring.
So in this case, sown March, planted April,
fleeced over to stop rabbits eating them,
and then we keep picking.
So you need to keep picking the blooms
to encourage them to flower all summer,
and also water your plants.
They love moisture, sweet peas,
And in terms of what you can grow under apples,
We'll go over to the west side now and have a look there
because you'll see some bigger apple trees
with more flowers.
Just on the way to the bigger apple trees,
there's actually a little row here of pear
and gage and plum,
bigger trees, again,
where I've underplanted with some different flowers
I want to show you like sedum.
So that's a perennial, very long-lived,
and it just gets bigger every year.
Another perennial,
probably the easiest one to show you is this penstemon.
Penstemons are just brilliant because they just keep coming
and they flower through the summer and into the late summer,
even early autumn, so they give you a long period.
Again, it's the end of the year when other flowers are less
and these are sowed, actually,
last June from seed and they were planted here in July,
early August, and they started flowering September.
So that's one way of doing it.
Or you can divide the clumps in the spring
and make new plants that way.
So there's lots of ways of doing penstemons.
Here's some penstemons that haven't actually
started to flower yet.
So there's many types.
This is one, a red lobelia, that's a perennial,
and there's some self-sowing annuals here like poppies.
So once you've got a poppy,
and then if you ever allow them to seed,
these are the seed heads.
There's not ripe seeds in there yet,
but once they ripen, that goes brown,
and then that will drop like a million seeds
and you'll have poppies forevermore.
So maybe you just want to let one seed head go,
but mostly I'm deadheading them.
They don't last for long, poppy flowers,
but they do look very pretty.
And two more flowers here I'd love to mention
is the lychnis there,
Rose Campion, as it's called sometimes.
So that's that gorgeous deep color,
which carries on for quite a bit of the summer
if you've got the patience to deadhead it,
'cause there's lots and lots of them.
And then as each flower dies off,
it will make a viable seed head,
so you kind of end up with a lot of lychnis,
but they are also perennial.
So again, many options for keeping them going.
And here we have bulbs.
So that's something I haven't mentioned yet.
You know, if you wanted quick flowers,
they cost more money for sure.
You buy bulbs.
These are gladioli,
so these will make those beautiful long stems
towards the end of summer.
And we pop them in.
There's actually big gladioli and little gladioli.
You can get gladioli of all different sizes,
according to the description on the bulb.
So have a browse through a catalog of bulbs
if you fancy that.
And yeah, let's go and see the apple trees as well now.
These apple trees are on a more vigorous rootstock.
They were planted at the same time
as the ones we saw before,
so this is MM106.
Which, the root stock, which is the bit down here,
gives the tree more vigor.
These guards, by the way,
are to stop the rabbits gnawing the bark,
which can ring bark the tree and kill it.
And you can see how they're quite tall trees,
but with enough space between
and apples don't make total shade,
so you can really have fun with underplanting
whatever you fancy.
This is a nice, easy one,
which is Verbena Bonariensis,
so that's a tall elegant bloom
which makes little mauve pom-poms
flowering through late summer into autumn.
Also prolifically self-seeding,
so we're often hoeing little seedlings from it
just to have not too many.
I planted a few little annual lobelias there.
The Eschscholzia just self-seeds here,
and there's a tall lovage here,
which is just for ornament, really, not so much color.
And then on this side,
we got also some edibles like seakale,
so this can be eaten in spring as leaves.
Then it makes the flowering like broccoli.
It's a brassica relative.
So then you can cut these stems out,
once the flowering is finished.
That goes to compost and you can
see the new growth then coming at the base,
which will feed the root for more harvest next spring.
Just recently, I noticed growing here a weed,
which you may recognize as actually a walnut tree.
So that is from a walnut that
must've been buried there by a squirrel, I think.
And I've be pulling out quite a few
because I don't want my garden turning into a walnut grove.
So that's something to keep an eye out for.
And then two other lovely things flowering here,
mainly going to be flowing very soon, is dahlias,
so dahlias with different colors,
even different color leaves,
and some that I sowed as long ago as four years ago.
We're not too cold here in the wintertime,
say 20 Fahrenheit, minus five, six centigrade.
Mulch of compost over the top protects
the tubers from frost,
and behind those tall elegant spires
are going to be very deep colors of hollyhock blooms.
So hollyhocks are a lovely perennial flower
that actually self-sowed as seed last spring, early summer,
and I planted there late summer last year.
It hasn't flowered yet,
so that's the first hollyhock blooms that we're getting
and they should come back every year.
And then just to finish this video,
let's have a look over the other side of my house
and we'll see another border
and how we use the flowers
amongst the vegetables a bit as well.
The area I'm walking through now, just over five years ago,
this was a sea of mud,
and the builder had been driving over it
building the conservatory here,
in a very wet late winter, early spring,
and I didn't do anything to sow it,
waiting for it to dry out,
and then scattered compost on top, a bit of grass seed.
That made the lawn here.
And then for the flower border, I put on extra compost.
This had around 10, 12 centimeter,
four or five inches of well-rotted cow manure,
good stuff, on top of what had been mud,
but it was drying-out soil, basically,
and it's made a really reliable
and easy-to-maintain flower border over five years,
coming to six now.
So some of these plants are quite old,
like the echinacea there, for example,
which flowers late summer.
Some are quite new,
like this mallow I planted only late summer.
I it's a bit more vigorous than I anticipated.
I mean, mallow, Malva, is a kind of weed, actually,
in terms of it's very easy to grow,
but much liked by insects and very pretty.
I've just been thinning it out a bit, in fat.
Here we have a rose,
which is an original survivor from Homeacres.
And this one I'd like to mention
because it's a bit unusual for being in a flower border.
It's common meadow rue, Thalictrum,
so it's of the Thalictrum family.
There's actually a more elegant Thalictrum you can get,
which is the purple one.
You'll see the name in the subtitle for that one,
but this one is quite vigorous and easy to grow
and has that beautiful mauvey
sort of purpley almost leaf color.
So it just looks nice even before it starts
to make these little yellow pompoms or flowers.
And also here I've been doing something with the soil,
which is mulching it a bit differently
to elsewhere in the garden.
And this is a digest state, it's called,
which is the byproduct of making methane,
so farmers who ferment anaerobically grass,
and soilage in this case,
into methane, so that's how the gas,
well, to produce the gas,
and that's the end result.
It's not really compost, well, it's not compost.
It's quite dry,
but it makes a very good surface mulch,
which when it rains will then hold the moisture
and slowly feed soil life as well.
And we're having unusually dry weather here at the moment,
so it's a nice surface mulch
to keep the last bit of moisture in there.
I haven't watered anything here.
You can see it's all looking pretty healthy.
And finally, let's have a quick look at the flowers
growing in the main vegetable garden.
In the main vegetable area of Homeacres Garden,
I love to have a few flowers dotted around,
particularly at the ends.
It's very easy just to frame the end of a bed
with some flowers like these violas,
which actually are perennials,
so they come back every spring.
They've been flowering away there since April.
And they'll go on for a little bit more yet.
And actually, then again, like a lot of flowering plants,
once they finish flowering,
I'll cut them to the ground and they'll come back again
rather than let them drop 10 million seeds.
And behind me, there's an interesting one,
which is Primula candelabra.
Very elegant.
There were four here, originally.
I put them here because they love shady moisture,
and this is the north side of the only two wooden-sided beds
I'll have in the garden.
And they've done it again this spring.
Look really nice.
So I'm using flowers as a way of
increasing the diversity in the garden
and increasing the beauty.
Flowers are just so much fun to play with,
and you've got that incredible choice
of annuals and perennials,
different colors, shapes, and forms.
So have fun,
and you can increase your success
with vegetables as well by having some flowers there.
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