Grow your own Archives – Welcome to The Moosbach Garden

Good morning to you all. Here in the Moosbach Garden the sun is shining and my heart is filled with hope. No sign of rain on the horizon so we are keeping a close eye on all of the pots, next week the forecast is for windy weather and this can dry pots and soil out as quickly as sunny weather.

Here are some photographs that I took this morning after breakfast.

We applied a good measure of well rotted chicken manure to all of our fruit trees last Winter and the trees have thanked us with a wonderful display of blossom and hopefully in the autumn, plentiful fruit.

Quince Blossom is exquisitely delicate and beautiful

Quince come in a variety of forms, here in The Moosbach Garden we have 2 types, an apple quince and a pear quince. The can take quite a few years to get going but once they are fruiting well you can make jam or chutney from them. The chutney is especially good with game.

With young trees like this it is best to thin out the fruits once they have set as the thin stems on young trees will not support the weight of too much fruit and may snap. It is best to give fruit trees a good soak once a week, this is preferable to daily watering and better for the trees.

Cardoons are great for adding structure to a garden

Cardoons are a really good addition to a garden or flower bed, they add a ‘wow’ factor with their spiky leaves and grey/silver foliage.

I can’t think of a more perfect shrub at this time of year, each floret is a flawless work of art and it is worth shopping around and getting one with heady perfume.

Peonies come in 3 types, perennial, trees and intersectional. Most people know the perennial varieties that disappear beneath the ground every Winter and then magically pop their dark red buds through the soil in Spring. Less known are the other 2 varieties, namely tree peonies and Intersectional. Tree Peonies can grown up to 2 meters tall and wide and are a real show piece in a garden. They have large exotic flowers that grow on the previous seasons growth, don’t be tempted to cut them back or you’ll get no flowers the following year. Finally there are intersectional peonies that are a cross between the 2 other types, they also have hard wood that stays above ground all year and these come in a stunning array of colours. For best results fertilize with fish, blood and bone in the winter.

Climbing roses are best trained in a fan shape

Climbing roses should be trained with their stems replicating a fan pattern, think of a male peacocks feather display and you are about right. The most productive zone, referred to as the goldilocks zone, is from horizontal to about 45 degrees. When you train the stems in this way they produce lots of lateral shoots (as shown above) and each of these will produce a cluster of roses and create a stunning display.

Roses (depending upon where you live in the world) should be putting on vigorous new growth and producing the rose buds for that first flush of flowers. My tips for success with roses are to feed when the first leaves appear and then again after the first flush of flowers has finished, obviously well-rooted manure in Winter is the perfect solution. My second tip is to water the roses well from the base of the plant from the moment the first buds appear until Autumn (October time here). Roses don’t like to sit in water but neither do they like to dry out. Remember water and nutrients are the building blocks of life, deprive them of either and they will not perform as well.

I wish you all a very pleasant weekend and don’t forget that when the restrictions are over we will be open for dinner, bed and breakfast. Fantastic food, organically grown in The Moosbach Garden, local wines and fresh laid eggs from The Moosbach Garden Chickens. You can wander around the garden of relax on a bench with a good book. Overnight stays include pre-dinner drinks, a 4-course menu and breakfast with homemade bread and jams. To book visit The Moosbach Garden

Also check our website for dates when the garden is open to the public.

I’m a big fan of the Royal Horticultural Society, it does so much great work and is so proactive in engaging with people who are new to gardening. I’ve been a member of the Society for quite a few years now and the benefits are multitudinous.

With the membership you get the magazine for free (worth the membership fee on its own) but you can also ask their gardening experts for assistance with all things plant related. The RHS has some choice gardens that you can visit and one of these is RHS Rosemoor in Devon. I would describe RHS Rosemoor as a garden park rather than a garden as it is very large.

I didn’t have any expectations from RHS Rosemoor, we’d had a manic few days, it was boiling hot and we had spent the morning walking coastal paths. We had decided that it was too hot to walk any more coastal paths and to be honest we were both feeling tired. Thomas suggested a trip to Rosemoor. So, we made the hour-long trip from our holiday cottage near Bude to RHS Rosemoor. I was really not feeling in the mood for another 3 hours walking around a garden in the heat and all I really wanted to be was sit in the shade with nothing but a nicely chilled bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for company. I think that sometimes life is like that, the parties that you really don’t want to go to turn out to be the best. This turned out to be the case with RHS Rosemoor, what a fantastic place.

Now, for starters, RHS Rosemoor is a garden on a very large-scale and it is crammed full of interesting garden rooms, amazing vista’s and fantastic ideas.

The Queen Mother’s rose garden has been in existence for 16 years and was looking stunning, as you may be aware I am a new convert to the joy of growing roses so I was particularly interested in this garden. There wasn’t a huge variety of roses on display but they have created a wonderous display by planting enmasse. I think that the rose garden looks beautiful especially bearing in mind the hot summer and lack of rainfall, I have to water our garden for 6 hours a day so I appreciate the mammoth task that they have at RHS Rosemoor.

I think what makes RHS Rosemoor so great is that it has something to suit everybody’s taste and because of the scale of the garden you never feel that a gardening style has been crammed into a corner jus for the sake of it. There are some classically designed garden styles on display in the garden like the long avenues planted with Yew hedging with a statue or tree in the distance making the garden feel like it goes on forever.

As you would expect from an organisation that advocates growing your own fruit and vegetables the orchards and vegetable gardens were fantastic and much tidier and weed free than mine.

Although there were lots of cars and coaches in the car park RHS Rosemoor never felt crowded, partly due to the large size of the garden and this was really nice. I am a firm believer in being able to mooch around a garden in solitude, undisturbed by masses of noisy visitors (I’m getting older and I’m entitled to be grumpy). At no point during our visit did I feel anything but calm serenity and that makes RHS Rosemoor the perfect place to revitalise your spirit or be inspired to try new things in your garden at home.

One of the many things that inspired us on the day were the creative use of materials for creating steps, pergola’s, benches and walls.