Bees, Buckets and Buzzing for the Festival

We are full swing into the Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival countdown now with just under a month to go until the gates open, 17th –19th September, and the whole team’s been planning hard behind the scenes. The programme is locked in, the stages are being mapped out, and there’s fair bit of head-scratching about where to locate everything.

In case you haven’t seen the deets, each day has its own theme:

• Thursday 17th is  It’s a Gardening World, all about biodiversity and climate resilience - exactly the sort of thing this summer has taught us the hard way!

• Friday 18th is  Colour Confidence, a celebration of planting design and playing with colour. The stuff that brings a little pizzaz to your planting.

• Saturday 19th is  Mission Possible, a practical day packed with garden tips, tit bits and know-how.

We are kicking things off on the Thursday with a live recording of  The James and Joe Garden Show, James Alexander-Sinclair and Joe Swift’s Garden Collective  podcast, so that should be quite the start!

And of course, we’ve got some brilliant company joining us across the three days with Arit Anderson, Frances Tophill and Nick Bailey, Dave Goulson, Poppy Okotcha, John Little, Mark Diacono and plenty more. You can check out the full line up here.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a garden festival without a spot of shopping. There will be garden traders and nurseries galore, so grab a wheelbarrow and fill your boots.

Garden Diary

A little lift from the LORB (load of rubbish bed) this week - we’ve noticed solitary bees busy moving in and buzzing in and out of the little wood and brick habitats we’d built into it. That’s exactly why we put them in, hoping something would eventually find them and it’s genuinely wonderful watching them being used. It might look like a small win, but for us…it’s made our whole week!

Elsewhere, we are still very much in drought-coping mode. The borders we cut back hard, spot-watered and mulched a couple of weeks ago have started putting on a little fresh growth, nothing dramatic, but it’s there, and it’s a reminder of just how much mulch does for a plant’s chances. If you only change one thing next year, make it that.

And then, last night, finally the rain we’ve all been waiting for finally arrived! In readiness, Nathan and the team emptied a big trough by hand into anything that would hold water: buckets, cans, even a wheelie bin, whatever vessel we could find, so that the trough could refill again and our containers could be topped up by the rainfall. It felt celebratory, if slightly mad!

Notes from Head Gardener Nathan

Over to Nathan, our Head Gardener, for this week’s update:

We’ve just about finished summer pruning the crab apple espaliers, Malus x robusta ‘Red Sentinel’, it takes the team a full day, up and down ladders on both sides, but they’re looking sharp now.

The Honesty seedlings we sowed last week are already appearing, always nice to see something come through quickly. In terms of what’s looking good right now, the roses are doing really well despite everything the drought’s thrown at them, Rosa ‘Buff Beauty’ in particular is putting on a lovely second flush.

The annuals beds we sowed in mid-July are looking green again too, which is genuinely exciting given the conditions. We watered them sparingly just to get them to germinate, then left them to their own devices after that. We did have a bit of a setback, we spotted a few pigeons working their way through the seed (I don’t blame them!) so we’ve had to re-sow two areas again last Friday. This time we’ve installed a home-made bird-scaring contraption out of strings and old CDs, so fingers crossed my questionable music taste is enough to keep them away!

Join us at the Festival.

The countdown is officially on, don't miss out grab your tickets below.