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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How to Make Calendula Soap With Fresh Flowers
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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A Bouquet for Friends
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
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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