Etched Behind Eyelids | August 2023
Recent Cosmos Posies From the Allotment
One of the best decisions I made for our allotment was to grow lots of flowers alongside our edible crops. I sowed seeds with both pollinators and cut flowers in mind. We’ve struggled with slugs, badgers, foxes, squirrels, sandy soil, too little rain and then too much rain, but one thing we haven’t struggled with is pollination, and I put that down to our plot having large stands of cerinthe, chamomile, buckwheat, phacelia, calendula and cosmos to attract pollinating insects who then stick around to pollinate our vegetables. I’m growing dahlias too, but most of my dahlias are decorative varieties with closed centres, which are just grown as cut flowers. I don’t feel bad about the inaccessible centres of my dahlias because there are plenty of open centred flowers that the bees and wasps can enjoy. They don’t go without.
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Botanical Dye | Dyeing Cotton With Goldenrod
I have been curious to try dyeing with plants for a while now, and finally got round to it. For my first dye pot I chose goldenrod (solidago canadensis) as it grows locally on wasteland. There’s plenty growing alongside the canal, and August is the month it blooms.
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Gwaun Cerrig LLwydion and Caerfanell Waterfalls
Late Summer Surprises
The larger varieties of cosmos I am growing this year have started to open. This one is called cosmos ‘white cupcakes’ because the petals are fused together so that it looks like a paper cupcake (or fairy cake) case. They’re so pretty.
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