I recently made some cold process soap with fresh calendula flowers I grew on my allotment, and made a video sharing the method and recipe. I thought I’d share it as a blogpost too as from time to time people find my blog through search engines, and perhaps you’ve found this post by searching for a recipe for calendula soap yourself.
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One of Ed’s running friends and his fiancée have recently had a baby, and I really wanted to be able to give them a bunch of home-grown flowers to celebrate. Baby girl was born towards the end of July but our wet and overcast summer, coupled with our first year soil, has meant that our flowers weren’t quite ready. Knowing that life with a newborn and your firstborn is quite full on and there will have been lots of people queuing up to congratulate them and meet their daughter, we waited a couple of weeks for the flowers to be ready before paying them a visit ourselves, with flowers and a loaf of homemade bread.
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The first of the dahlias have flowered. These are orange fubuki dahlias, they’re a soft peach / coral / pink colour rather than a true orange, and they’re just as pretty as I was hoping they’d be. I have had such a struggle to get my dahlias to bloom this year. It’s been a very wet spring and summer overall other than a 5 week period in May and June where we had no rain at all. At first my dahlia tubers got dug up by wild animals, it was either squirrels, foxes or badgers. They’d dig them up and leave them to dry out on the soil surface, covered in teeth marks. This stressed the tubers, and set them back in starting into growth. In the end I laid down holly branches across the entire dahlia bed and this stopped the animals from digging.
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July has been a very wet month, and the temperature has hovered around 18C. Ed and I fell behind on weeding at the start of the month as it was too wet to spend much time at the allotment, but by the end of the month I feel like we’re on top of it again, for the time being. This first year is very weedy because we dug over the whole plot between October and February to clear the rubble, remove bushes, and generally clear up years worth of neglect. Every year out from the big dig the weed pressure should reduce as we won’t be disturbing the soil and exposing the seed bank to light in the same way.
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