Day 36 of the 100 day project

Another pause in the 100 day project because of a quick trip to the West of Ireland to the Loop Head Peninsula.  Lovely, lively interesting place with a classic mixture of Irish weather: some blasting wind and rain, some showers and sunshine, some drizzle and some sun and warm hospitality.  And now I am back again knowing that I must engage with the 100 day project of lose it.  And I don't want to lose it, so here goes.

Yesterday and today have been full of sunshine and warmth.  The light and warmth pull me outside, like iron filings to a magnet.  I had breakfast and lunch outside yesterday and lunch outside again today.  I have been trying to do something about the cutting garden.

The cutting garden sits in the field by the orchard, two large squares made into a chequerboard of eight spaces for planting.  I always wanted a cutting garden.  I love flowers in the house but when I had a smaller garden I often found myself reluctant to cut flowers because of the holes they left in the borders.  Here there is plenty of space and double the need for cut flowers because we always put some in the holiday cottage.  So after a couple of years of buying flowers at great expense we took the plunge and lifted the turf for a cutting garden.  I planted two crosses of tiny box plants to delineate the space.  They are about eighteen inches high now and a chunky, proper presence.  Perhaps for five years or so I kept the squares empty of perennial things and grew annuals from seed every year.  I look back at my garden diary from the days when I spent two or three days a week in the garden and I am surprised to discover how many things I tried, and how many things didn't really deliver when they were transferred from the seed trays in the greenhouse to outside: bells of Ireland, cerinthe major, ammi majus.  And how many things did thrive: cosmos, euphorbia oblongata, cornflowers, and sweet peas, as long as the trench was manured or composted to a ridiculous degree.

When time got tight with family responsibilities I changed one square over to perennial euphorbia palustris and a yellow achillea and began to restrict myself to the things I knew would grow.  I had one season the year my father died when all that was planted were sweet pea seedlings and cosmos which I got from the nursery and since then I have often bought in seedlings of sweet peas and cosmos.  Last year I turned another two squares over to perennials, introducing different grasses.  One of these squares I really like, one is disappointingly scruffy.

I have spent two hours weeding the weedfilled cutting garden and I am really unsure what to do with it.  It is too late in the season now I think to grow much from seed (but maybe not??) and I am really unsure about how to go forward with it.  I will definitely give a couple of squares over to cosmos, bought as seedlings now I think.  It grows well up here, has lovely foliage as well as flower and produces flowers which always look good in a vase.

But that still leaves two or three squares at least.  Do I plant more perennials or grasses, regardless of whether they work as cut flowers and aim for something easier to look after?  After all it doesn't have to be a cutting garden.  I could just call it something else.  Do I plant perennials but try to keep the sense of a cutting garden, and if so, what?  Do I try to grow some things from seed?  I might direct sow opium poppies and cornflowers although I think it is a bit late but they don't work there is nothing really lost.  Do I buy in lots of annual seedlings and boost the soil as much as I can and try to reclaim the idea of a cutting garden?  Do I plant up a couple of squares with more box just for the lovely evergreen chunkiness of it all and let flower go?  I really can't decide.

Any thoughts or suggestions very welcome!

And here, just because it is beautiful and fleeting and I want to share it with you, is the first blossom opening on our magnolia.