Our Garden in August 🪻🪻

Here's the latest update from Erika, our Head Gardener at the Secret Garden Distillery.

The meadow seed mixes that we sowed in spring are thriving at the moment. Not all our planting is used to make our premium gins, these wildflowers are key to creating our all-natural gins in an environmentally-friendly way to encourage insects and pollinators key to a healthy garden.

You are met by a colourful display as soon as you enter the site, just outside the shop and the glasshouse. We sowed the same mix just next to our beehives and the bees and other pollinators are very much appreciating all the different blooms!

Our focus this month is harvesting as much lavender as possible. Joining the lavender flowers in the drying rooms are black violets, hollyhock petals, mallow flowers and mints.

      

The roses have finished flowering now, and we have started pruning the plants to give them a bit more room and aeration. We do this by removing dead, diseased and damaged branches as well as shaping the bush. Apothecary roses are an old fashioned type of rose - flowering just the once each season. This means that it flowers on the previous year’s growth, instead of the same year’s growth as other more common and modern rose varieties. Other roses are usually pruned while dormant over winter, but old fashioned roses should be pruned immediately after flowering. This month you can also give your fruit trees a bit of a summer prune. We are giving our espalier pears in the glasshouse and the garden a bit of a haircut. Simply shorten the long new shoots to three or four leaves from the horizontal branch/basal cluster.

A highlight in the garden at the moment are the grapes slowly ripening in the glasshouse and the gorgeous sunflowers amongst the marshmallows.