Springhill Stories

Now the garden season is coming into the slow mode, I thought it was the perfect moment to have a look at the garden the past 3 months. The garden has definitely suffered less of drought than previous year, although some of the blooms got a crack during the last heatwave and stopped blooming earlier then they should have.

When it comes to the vegetables, this year was a real mixed bag. Lot’s of tomatoes, beans and cucumbers and also the beets didn’t do bad. But Bell peppers, corn and chard were not in a good mood this year. Most of my cabbages got eaten by snails … those little horrors did a lot of damage. The pumpkins were not great either, with only 3 pumpkins harvested in total. But the nice thing is there is always a next year and I am already looking into new vegetables and varieties to grow.

Now that the first freeze kissed the garden it is also time to start working on the winterjobs in the garden. And I have a rather ambitious amount of them this year (maybe too ambitious). Currently I am moving the raised beds from the vegetable garden to the frontgarden. This will leave me with a whole new big space to plant up some new pretty borders. Another project I started with are some stairs to the garden shed. I noticed we always make a short cut when going there and choose to take the steep way. But that can be quite tricky, so some steps will make it much more comfortable. The last project I want to tackle is a pergola above the the pool terrace, providing protection against the sun and curious eyes of some neighbours. So let’s see where I will end up.

Also planned for this winter is planting some more trees and shrubs. In the orchard part of the garden I will add 6 new fruit trees.

• Quince
• Apple “Elstar” & “President H.Van Dievoet”
• Plum “Reine Claude d’Althan” & “Altesse Simple”
• Cherry “Sam”

These are all local old varieties (except Elstar). Our old cherry tree is doing quite bad and so it’s time to think ahead and make sure succesion is guaranteed when he would decide to die.

In the back of the garden we are going to plant a wide zone with indigenous shrubs (elderflower, sloe, lilac, hazel, dogwood and dog rose) to block the view onto the fence of our neighbours and also create some extra privacy)

So you see, no time to rest !