How the garden is doing in June

Time to do a bit of an update from home! We have the next wave of orchids blooming in the lawn. We knew they were there from last year, so after the first flush of orchids had finished K went around with link stakes to mark where he spotted orchid leaves - tons of them! Yet they hadn't been apparently visible and I was worried they had been mown off! I needn't have worried. 

We have more than 60 Pyramid Orchids (!!!), eight Lizard Orchids, twice as many as last year, and there were also several dozen Man Orchids, which have pretty much gone over now. The lawn looks fantastic with pink lollipops in it, and there are far more than shown here and also in the back lawn and the bank and ditch outside the hedge. 😀

The Pyramid Orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis) close up:

Lizard Orchid (Himantoglossum hircinum):

Man Orchid (Orchis anthropophora), going over. Look at the top and there are still a few flowers showing the 'naked man' shape in yellow, the rest have gone brown. (There is also a Naked Man Orchid, which is different, just to confuse you!).

The clematis is flowering on the new arch, and the Bignone on the other side has finally started growing after two months of looking like a dead stick. I hope it will have flowers this year.

Going round to the pool, I have planted up a load of pots with bright oranges, reds, yellows and whites this year. That's because I have planted two really huge tubs with cannas and dahlias in yellow and orange (out of view in this picture). I should have bought them in the autumn when there was more choice - also whilst we have many garden centres, we don't have any really huge ones like the one we used to go to in Brittany, so sometimes have to go to more than one to get what we need.

The pink geraniums which overwintered in the covered terrace have gone round the front of the house, so as to not have a horrible clash of colours. I did buy a few more geraniums, because I still want to see the pesky Geranium Bronze butterfly, but I don't want it destroying my flowers totally, like last year, where I had no more flowers after August. 

Now round to the covered terrace. My Ikea order arrived recently and I bought a lovely Bakers Shelf so that I could put my indoor orchids and Streptocarpus outside for the summer, also it's somewhere I can put plants that have just been repotted or cuttings, as it's mostly in the shade.

I also ordered these party lights - there is another swag over to one of the columns where the cable runs down to my lime tree as it's solar run and we put the peg in there.

It's taken a whole year to get it looking almost how I wanted it, as this year I didn't sow any seeds so we can actually see blank space on the table now! 😀 I would like to find more wall decorations and keep meaning to go to some of the brocantes (second hand/vintage places) now that everything is open again. (We also keep meaning to go to a market - amazing the amount of things we haven't done yet despite living here for 1.5 years - all due to the pandemic of course). I need a market to find the right table cloth - usually you can buy plastic tableclothing by the length off a roll and the most choice is usually at a market.

Now round the side to my herb bed, which has astounded me by the growth of some of the plants! Notably the green sage (middle left), the sarriette (winter savoury) to the right of it and the hyssop which is flowering now to the right of that, next to the pot. I had hoped the green sage would flower, but strangely enough the only flowers have been on the tricolour sage next to the green one!

I cheated this year and bought some curly parsley plants, which prompty got covered in black fly and honeydew. Sigh. I've found quite a few bugs on my patio plants, those white fluffy aphids on my olive, and a strange kind of (I assume) scale plant on a rosemary. I have used savon noir spray which is ok for organic use and doesn't harm bees, and seems to be controlling the situation. I also spray things in pots away from other plants and often inside in the shower!

We are having a wonderful year for cherries. I thought last year was good enough but the first cherry tree (not this one) had huge dark red cherries and I've made clafouti, jam and then I tried a cherry and almond crumble, which was amazing! I replaced about a third of the flour with ground almonds and added quite a lot of slivered almonds too. Now the second tree, this one, is fruiting like mad and I think I will depip some and freeze them, in the hope that will work and we can have clafouti and crumble later on in the year. Of course we eat loads just as is, and I eat tons whilst I'm harvesting them too, of course.

Something I haven't shown yet are my mushrooms! I wanted some garden decorations, and when I saw on a local facebook group a lady showing her husband's wood carvery I saw his mushrooms and fell in love! We were lucky that he had a really huge block of wood as a one off so made the largest mushroom from that. It's exceedingly heavy and is about three foot tall. We are supposed to varnish them twice a year and I think the large one looks like it needs another coat already. We plan on keeping them under cover during the winter, so that should keep them going for many more years. This was a secret Xmas present to Keith and me, all I told him was that we had to go and meet someone at a supermarket car park in Limoux to pick up something very heavy..... he was intrigued, to say the least. I 'think' he was happy with them, even though he was the one who did the varnishing. 😁

Well that's it from Villa Moorhen for the moment. No interesting bugs of note, although we did have a Scarce Swallowtail perching on my rusty butterfly ornament! The weather has finally turned summery, we are making up for the lack of warm weather this spring by barbecueing like mad and we had our first swim the other day - the pool is now lovely and warm after 30C weather for a week!