Like Adam Pasco, I’ve just returned from the Gardeners’ World Magazine 20th Anniversary cruise. Adam wrote about the gardens we visited in his blog, earlier this week, including Mount user, Bodnant, The Castle of Mey and The Beth Chatto Gardens in Essex. All of the gardens were wonderful, but I found Beth Chatto’s garden particularly invigorating and inspiring. It was wonderful to be greeted by Beth, who is a delightful lady.

After all the excitement of the trip, it was back to my own garden in Hampshire. Everything was looking somewhat overgrown, after my 10 days away. It was amazing how many weeds had emerged. Three of us have just spent hours weeding, mowing and sorting, and my hands are still buzzing from the nettle stings, despite the chunky gloves I was wearing.

We harvested some early autumn-fruiting raspberries, which we enjoyed later with some wonderfully creamy organic vanilla ice cream. This is the first proper fruiting year from many of my raspberry canes, and I’m pleased they are cropping so heavily. I’m tempted to plant some more, as they are such good value, and their flavour far exceeds that of shop-bought fruits. If you have room for some raspberry canes in your garden, I’d heartily recommend growing some.  ‘Autumn Bliss’ and ‘Joan J’ are particularly good varieties, and many people have recommended the newer variety, ‘Polka’, to me so I think I’ll give that a try, too…

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: A 'Malign Intellectual Subculture' - George Monbiot Smears Chomsky, Herman, Peterson, Pilger And Media Lens.