This is a time of major production in the glasshouses with the combination of soaring temperatures, an overhead irrigation system, good ventilation, well-fed soil and continual weeding allowing crops to develop fast. Broad beans, mangetout, carrots, beetroot, lettuces, herbs, courgettes, spinach, spring onions and all sorts of salad leaves are bountiful. Aubergines and peppers have been planted into their bay, as have runner beans, french beans and some sweetcorn. The tomatoes are flowering and the cucumbers are producing their first tiny fruits.

The New Vegetable Plot Outside
This converted pig field is filling up fast with long rows of Jerusalem artichokes, onions and potatoes such as Derby day, Jersey wakefield, British queens, Sarpo mira and golden wonder. Two hundred crowns of asparagus have been planted which will take two years to mature before they can be picked. An experiment is being done with some onions; the sets have been planted under a thick mulch of seaweed. The theory is the onions can push their way through the seaweed whilst the weeds cannot and obviously the seaweed feeds the plants at the same time. It will be interesting to see the results. Weeds are a major issue when farming organically and one of the weeding methods we use is a weed burner on wheels. This works well as long as the weeds are got when small.

The Fruit Garden
The flowers that stand out this week are the alliums, or ornamental onions, with their large purple globe flowers, looking like miniature firework explosions, under the new foliage of the crab apple and almonds. Amongst the fruit bushes, wild strawberries and comfrey are flowering, and the amazingly scented flowers of sweet rocket are attracting many insects, as are the poached egg flowers, or limnanthes, with their equally intoxicating scent. They seem able to continuously produce blooms and are covered in busy honey bees and all sorts of flies. One of my favourite flowers here is erigeron, or mexican fleabane, which self-seeds everywhere. The black mulberry, on close inspection, has strange, small, green, bulbous flowers which should turn into lovely raspberry-like fruit. The mulberry has many medicinal uses and the fruit has long been forgotten about, perhaps because it’s not commercially viable as it doesn’t store or travel well. I can’t wait to try some.

The Potager
Everything is maturing quickly in this lovely sheltered spot. Peas and broad beans have filled up another large bed and spud plants are getting tall. Sweet peas have been planted alongside the new, dry stone wall leading into the corner of this garden and are climbing up with the help of chicken wire. The garden team are busy keeping on top of the weeds.

Lydia’s Garden
This old fashioned garden comes into its own this month with soft colours of pink, purple and white accented with the cerise, or magenta, (I couldn’t decide which) of these stunning gladioli.  Gorgeous salmon coloured foxgloves, geranium phaeum (mourning widow), purple wall flowers, peonies, honesty, catmint, old-fashioned roses, swaying tall grasses, steel obelisks with sweet peas winding up them, create a wonderful medley. A new metal viewing platform is lying ready to be erected in the corner of this garden, replacing the old wooden tree house which had been out of bounds for some time as it was getting too rickety. It will provided a wonderful bird’s eye view over the herb garden, and beyond, where you can really appreciate the formal patterns of the parterre.

The Herb Garden
Now that everything is in full growth again, the patterns here become more obvious. There is wonderful simplicity in the layout of these beds with concentric circles of two or three different herbs within a single bed: a rosemary bush surrounded by neat rings of parsley and chives, comfrey surrounded by salad burnet, cardoons surrounded by purple sage, a standard bay tree surrounded by horseradish, a lavender bush surrounded by thyme. Golden hops and sweet peas climb up metal obelisks within the circular beds. The borders at each end of the garden have been left much wilder, with plants allowed to self-seed to create a more naturalised effect, contrasting with the neat formality of the rest of this garden; foxgloves, fennel, mint, columbine, white comfrey, lemon balm and sweet cicely, all intermingled and vying for space. Tall spires of echium pininana (originating from the Canaries) are in flower reaching 2 or 3 metres each. The leaves form in the first year and flowers the second.

The Potager

In the Potager, or ornamental vegetable garden, our brilliant gardener Eileen has been working her magic. Just a week or so ago this garden was pretty much empty, the symmetrical layout of beds, in diamonds and triangles, looking stark. Now they are being filled with neat stripes of seedlings.

On the right as you enter through the gate, Florence fennel has been planted in fabulous formation, each about 12 inches apart, alongside the box hedging whose triangular criss-cross pattern echoes the layout in rest of the garden. These are a dwarf variety of the herb fennel. They grow into large crisp bulbs (formed from the swollen basal stem) and have a delicate aniseed flavour.

In one large diamond bed are beautiful rows of vegetables with contrasting leaf shape and colour: endive lettuce, beetroot, spinach ‘Linda Prentice’, swiss chard, rhubarb chard, onions, garlic, shallots, red onions, all neatly covered with a net to keep hungry hens out.

One triangular bed is planted with celeriac alternating with marigolds. Marigolds (calendula officinalis) are not only pretty, orange, edible flowers, the petals used in salads, but also attract beneficial insects that will control the pest populations.

In the brassica bed, netted to keep off marauding butterflies, can be found red kale, cabbage, red cabbage, mizuna, kohl rabi, mustard greens, purple sprouting broccoli, tatsoi (a form of Chinese flat cabage), edible chrysanthemum, calabrese ‘veronica’, mibuna and cauliflower; again all edged with marigolds. It will be a mouth-watering delight to watch these grow!

These plants (apart from the onions and garlic) began as seeds being sown into good compost in modular trays and put into the growing room to germinate under bright lights. Once sprouted, they were then moved to the glasshouses to get natural light, water and heat. They were then ‘hardened off’ (http://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profiles0504/hardening_off.asp) before being planted outside otherwise the temperature change would damage them.

There are some vegetables, however, which do not like to be planted in trays. These plants, namely potatoes, carrots, beetroot, onions and garlic, prefer to be planted in situ as their roots do not like disturbance.One of the diamond beds is dedicated to root vegetables. Interesting varieties of potato have been planted whose tips are beginning to protude: pink fir apple, skerry champion, sarpo, yukon gold to name but a few.

At the far end, the potager is overlooked by a living summer house of copper beech which is now covered in dark, purple-bronze leaves. Tidy lines of purple oak leaf lettuce lead the eye up the steps to the bower. Four neatly clipped egg-shaped standard bay trees add height and definition to the garden from the centre of each triangular bed, and, along the far side, spiky, grey-green artichokes add drama, whilst catmint softens the edges. A wooden trellis enclosing a sheltered bench breaks up this area, with stunning golden hops climbing over it. Hops is a very fast growing perennial and sprouts anew each year from ground level. It can reach 20 feet.

Joy Larkcom has been a huge inspiration to this garden and vice versa and pictures of the potager are included in her book ‘Creative Vegetable Gardening’.