For the first time I’ve started to contemplate how I can combine having a flower garden with my food growing aspirations.  Before now I’ve sort of separated gardening and growing as two distinct things as I couldn’t imagine how I’d do both well.  After visiting the Organic Garden at Ryton yesterday I can now see a way how I can get the colour of flowers as part of a productive food garden. This has ramped up my ambitions further.

The challenge is now to hold back on all the ideas I’ve got and concentrate on putting a few of them into place rather than trying to do too much at once.  There are two things we’ll definitely do straight away when we get home – getting the sweet peas planted and also plant our banks of grass with wild flower seeds.

I may also include a couple of beds within the kitchen garden with some flowers to attract the bees and cheer me up as I wander around.  These wild flower beds were simple and colourful.

More organised planting can give you even more effective results.  I love the rather ramshackled wigwam, we could do that with the dead and fallen branches from our bush area.

There are lots of ways that floral planting can be achieved many of which I’ve seen in my own parents garden but couldn’t quite translate how it might fit in our rambling and unstructured landscape.  Now I can.

It would be nice to have colour from these sorts of flowers.

Or perhaps these.

This bed really caught my eye for the sheer brilliance of colour.  Sunflowers are really hard to beat for bringing sunshine into the garden.

But I loved the combination of colour and texture in this planting scheme.  I think I’ll master the died off but not dead headed look quite well!

I think the garden visiting has also inspired my mother-in-law.  She was so captivated with the gardens she started to talk about them as if they were her own.  Wishful thinking but I’m sure that by this time next year there will be a transformation in her garden as well.  Not that we’re competitive but it’s a nice challenge we can share.  Also, my father-in-law has signed up on the waiting list for an allotment so his growing aspirations are definitely on the up too.

Now all we need is to capture the energy of MT to move beyond the green house where he sees a nice comfy chair, kettle and pot for making tea where he can hide away and read the papers without being disturbed.  But first he’s got to build the greenhouse so I’ll let that be his gardening challenge for the year.