Newsletter Issue 7 - Late May 2026

Hello,

From unseasonably late frosts, to the hottest day in May on record, all in the space of eight days, we’ve had a particularly varied fortnight of weather.

After working under a beating sun all day yesterday, it was a delight to watch the skies darken and a thunderstorm roll in over a dinner of broad beans freshly picked from the garden. The storm was spectacular here, illuminating the sky in all directions, all sheets and forks, rumbling and grumbling on for over an hour. The ground even got a very small amount of much needed rain.

The flowers that were so reluctant to flower a week or so ago are now blooming in full force and it’s a race to keep up with them. The warm bank holiday caused every one of our main crop peonies to bloom over the course of four days. Pa has been extraordinarily busy harvesting them all and the majority are now safely stowed in the fridge, ready to flood our market stalls with pastel pinks and creams this coming weekend.

The Alstroemeria and Campanula in the tunnel have also been coming thick and fast with temperatures reaching a toasty 42.5 degrees. The very warm weather will eventually cause the Alstroemeria to become dormant in the tunnel, by which point our outdoor beds will take over the flowering, until the temperatures cool again later in the year.

The hot weather has prompted a decisive shift from spring flowers to summer flowers. After this week, the Ranunculus, Peonies and accompanying floaty, delicate flowers of spring will mostly be over. Some of our summer flowering plants have started to bloom this week like the perennial Campanula, Astrantia, Scabiosa and Verbena bonariensis- all the purples and blues. Others like the Achillea are colouring up and will likely join next week.

The soil in our main flower field is silty and dries out very fast so we’ve had the field irrigator on as much as possible. Fortunately, our taps are fed from a large lake and so we can use as much as the plants need. The mulching of perennial beds with straw and grass clippings continues with the intention of making the beds as drought tolerant as possible.

In response to the combination of moisture and hot sunshine, our annuals seem to be doubling in size every few days. We’ve netted the Statice, Malope and Antirrhinum already to encourage tall, straight stems. Most of the Dahlias are now in the ground, earlier than we usually manage to plant them, and so we’re hoping to be able to pick the earliest Dahlias we’ve ever had this year.

The threat of a frost suddenly feels like a distant memory and so we’ve finally been able to plant out our tender annuals. Our first succession of Cosmos, Zinnia and Helichrysum are now planted. The Callistephus is at the front of the queue for planting today.

Now that the new flower fridge is up and running, we’re able to break up spells of hot and sweaty sunshine work in the field with chilly sessions spent inside the fridge processing Peonies. It only takes about 10 minutes to go from feeling uncomfortably warm and bothered in the 32-degree, humid heat outside to having numb fingers and wearing a fleece inside the 3-degree fridge. It’s a bit like having one long, slightly dusty spa day!  During this early heat wave, the fridge has offered us considerable peace of mind in knowing that the flowers can escape the heat and can condition in cooler temperatures once cut.

This coming week, we’ll be beginning to pull up some of our tired spring crops and think about readying the beds for biennials. The flower collection hut is mostly complete and we’ll be adding DIY flower buckets to our online shop over the next few days for any flower enthusiasts who wish to experiment with a mix of seasonal flowers.