Of Mice and Volunteers

I had become quite obsessed by rain during May, or rather the lack of it. That was until today, the last day of May, when some of the lack of the last couple of months was dumped on the gardens in one day. It is now a sunny evening after the downpour. I know we need the rain but it could have fallen during the night, or on a day when we were shut, but oh no, it had to rain on a Bank Holiday.

The Kitchen Garden is becoming a bit of a challenge as the seeds I’ve planted in the greenhouses continually get attacked by the mice. Mice are particularly fond of any type of squash: pumpkin, melon, courgette... they keep eating them. Even the sunflowers have been decimated. I have finally decided to start some of the remaining seeds off on my own kitchen windowsill. And the carrots; is it possible that ants are running off with the seed? All I see on the carrot patch are ants and no carrots. Ah well.

At the beginning of the month we had a volunteer from Slovenia for a couple of weeks.(see pic) Irena is a student of Horticulture in Slovenia and needed to do some work experience as part of her course. She has family friends in Worcester who arranged for her to help out for a couple of weeks in the gardens, and she was such fun. Towards the end of the month we also had a young lad Chris, who is keen to learn more about horticulture and offered us a week’s work experience. We tried to arrange for a range of different tasks so that Irena and Chris could both experience as many aspects of the gardens as possible.

In the gardens we seem to have been over run with ground elder in just about every border we have. Its a bit of a challenge at the moment. We are expecting a group from the Royal Horticultural Society at the beginning of June, and are trying very hard to at least get the main borders tidy.