What a weekend! My best mate and I have returned from the Isle of Wight Festival, covered in dust but extremely happy after a few days of being amongst like-minded people, fantastic music, great vibes and beautiful weather. We were so lucky with the latter as the forecast was debatable right up to the last minute, but it helped us have a full and exciting experience that we are sure to repeat next year. If you were there, I hope you had as much fun as we did. We had to leave early on the Sunday as we needed to get back for work stuff on Monday, so we decided to give ourselves a few hours to explore. We ended up walking along the esplanade in Ryde then had the most amazing brunch at the The Crossing Cafe - seriously, the best eggs benedict I have ever had so if you find yourself in Ryde I highly recommend visiting the little cafe at 71 Union Street, you will not be disappointed.
Tim did a brilliant job of looking after the garden in my absence, and I can’t believe the difference a few days made along with some very garden-friendly weather. You can see from the photo above that although our cultivated strawberries haven’t fared too well this year, the wild alpine ones have gone mad, some are huge too so we (and the tortoise) are very happy to be tucking into them either with yoghurt for breakfast as I have just done, or with vanilla ice-cream for pudding. Elsewhere the tomatoes in the greenhouses are growing so well, we put stakes to them last night to stop them falling over now they have a lot of leaves, plus the pepper plants are coming along. Our mini cucumbers are producing more fruit than we can eat so I have picked some along with spring onions and radish to make a crunchy addition to sandwiches.
As mentioned before, we are doing a bit of a purple theme in the veg garden this year (Tim’s idea) and things are moving along nicely, the purple basil plants are growing massive leaves and the taste is magnificent, we had some chopped up in our salad last night which added a great flavour as well as colour. The kohlrabi are swelling and we have pretty flowers on the purple french beans hinting towards a decent crop before long. The flower borders are equally beautiful with the sweet-peas coming thick and fast, cosmos looking great and the fuschias blooming.
So, with more decent weather on the horizon we will be busy outside tending to our crops and trying to keep things relatively tidy, watering is almost a full-time job at the moment - not complaining as the sun and warmth is extremely welcome after such a cold, wet start to the year. Now the summer solstice has passed, here’s to a long, bright rest of the season.