Spring Cottage Ramblings
Val Bourne is an award-winning writer and winner of The Garden Media Guild’s Digital Gardening writing of the year 2023, awarded to her due to content produced for Hartley Botanic. This joins her six other major GMC awards, including; Journalist of the Year in 2020 and 2014; Columnist of the Year in 2018; and News Story of the Year in 2016.
She writes regularly for many publications and she’s a life-long organic gardener with a real interest in wildlife. She gardens in the cold Cotswolds, growing flowers, fruit, and vegetables – with the aid of a Hartley Botanic Greenhouse. Although bought for ornamentals, the Best Beloved has commandeered it for tomatoes and peppers!
Your greenhouse can revolutionise your garden, because it’s possible to grow a whole range of slightly tender plants, because you can raise them from cuttings. Many of these slightly tender plants come into their own from late-summer onwards, so they extend the season right up until winter beckons. This helps late-flowering pollinators (and gardeners) to […]
A Hartley Botanic greenhouse is not only a joy to behold, it’s also a useful gardening tool because it creates an ambient environment that encourages plant growth. And if you live where I live, in the aptly named village of Cold Aston, it’s a necessity for it’s parky up here! My greenhouse began life with […]
The Best Beloved has made a declaration. Apparently I have 91 named snowdrops that need planting and 30 of these are bedded into part of the vegetable bed, his vegetable bed, and “they will need planting first” he intones with great authority. I have acquired these treasures in the last few months, from various sources, […]
There are people who think that writers have an exciting life, full of jollies, junkets and japes. Nothing could be further from the truth. You see we writers write just to escape all that unnecessary razzmatazz. It’s so much easier living life on a written page, than doing it for real, so we hide away […]
The Best Beloved and I have been at Spring Cottage for eleven years, almost to the day, and I’ve had to learn to share and that’s not an easy thing for me. You see I am a twin and I had to share everything from a scooter, to a toy piano, to roller skates. It […]
I’m summer weary and tired of picking tomatoes, making jam in the evenings, watering and weeding! I’m waiting for the first frost, although last year we only had a couple and they came well after Christmas for it was the mildest winter ever in the cold, cold Cotswolds, in the wonderfully named village of Cold […]
The garden is a work in progress, well more work than progress if I’m honest, but I slid into summer a few days ago when I cut most of my tulips back in my rose and peony beds and planted several different cosmos I’d raised in 4 x 6 modular trays. The change was remarkable […]
I’ve always been interested in bees and thirty years ago I took part in a red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) study in an attempt to map their presence. I was a lot younger then and I sprinted over walls and chased up and down dale trying to find their nests in rural Northamptonshire, with limited success. […]
Colour is such a personal thing and most of us have a favourite. Mine of course is orange and it’s the choice of an exuberant Leo lady. You see I was born on the hottest day of the year, in July, and my mother never let me forget it. I’m unusual I know, for orange […]
In the last 30 years I’ve had two gardens and, although there were only 20 miles apart, they were as different as chalk and cheese, a bit like my children! My old garden in Hook Norton in Oxfordshire, famous for its beer, was a stone’s throw away from the church. The one-acre garden was on […]
