We’ve had some wonderful weather in May and the garden has burst into life over a matter of weeks.

Besides completing lots of planting around the pond, now that the pond liner is properly installed at the edges, we installed a sunflower garden!  Having grown 60 sunflowers from seed, we cleared a round bed and planted all 60 around a central sundial and used some cosmos to fill in the gaps.

We have four types of sunflower in the bed, ‘Kong’ which could grow to 15 feet high (!) at the back of the bed, in front of these and around the sides are the usual ‘Giant Single’ sunflowers.  Going into the circle in front of those are ‘Magic Roundabout’, a smaller sunflower with a deep red hue on the inner petals, and inside from those are some ‘Vanilla Ice’.  These will only grown to about 18″ and will be a lovely creamy hue.  We can’t wait to see it in flower.

Alongside all of this we have planted runner and french beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce in the vegetable garden.  Our strawberry bed is going to be very fruitful this year but the thing that we have been most excited about is our production of…… owls!

Following on from setting up the owl box in January, we could hear owlets in the box in mid-May.  The following week they had obviously fledged so we are keeping our eyes and ears open to see if a second brood is raised.

We are taking a new approach to the main meadow areas by leaving the grass to grow and cutting paths through and round it.  We are sure that we are already seeing the benefit, not just by cutting down on the mowing, but also an increase in insects and wildlife generally.