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| Autumn 2007 |
The vegetable garden We have extended our productive season both at the start and end of the main growing year. We sowed an overwintering variety of pea called ‘Meteor’ last autumn. Once the pods started filling out in late May, the chefs were able to nip out the growing pea tips for use in the kitchen. The peas were ready in early June, followed later by other varieties sown in spring. And now, almost into November, we still have plenty of salad leaves to pick from, protected by polytunnel cloches. Slugs and snails seem to have been prolific this year, probably because of the mild winter and the wet spring. Our spring sowings of mangetout were badly eaten by the blighters who ignored our beer traps and eggshells. So we came up with a new solution. 10mm black pond netting was pinned to the ground around the young plants. The fine grid and course texture seems to have deterred the pests allowing the pea plants to happily grow upwards out of harms way. Larger pests have made an appearance this year too. A rabbit has decided that our produce is fair game and has munched his way through some of our stepover apples and our tasty lettuces. Squirrels too have made the hotel garden their home and enjoy collecting the sweet chestnuts from the majestic tree in the grounds. |
Expanding our fruit collection |
The garden and our guests |
Flowers Nasturtium seeds are superb value for money. A few seeds sown in April or May will produce healthy plants that start to flower in June or July and continue through the summer and autumn. They look great grown up a garden obelisk or allowed to sprawl over the ground and through shrubs. The leaves and flowers are also used by our chefs in salads. As an added bonus, they will self-seed prolifically from year to year so you should never have to buy another packet of seed again! |
| Jesmond Dene House, Jesmond Dene Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE2 2EY, United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)191 212 3000 Fax: +44 (0) 191 212 3001 info@jesmonddenehouse.co.uk www.jesmonddenehouse.co.uk |
After a very warm winter, in which I could count the number of frosts on one hand, spring arrived with a weather pattern very similar to 2006. April brought warm sunshine and a dry spell. May turned colder and brought the delayed April showers. We prepared for another dry summer by adding more water butts to downpipes and mulching many of the borders with soil improver or manure. However, the hot summer of last year didn’t repeat itself. June was very wet and cool. The weather improved in August and September but was changeable. This led to some challenges in the vegetable plot very different to last year. Courgettes, sown directly into the ground in mid May, germinated erratically and then sat and sulked in the ground. There is always something that can grow though, whatever the summer brings, and this year’s successes were our lettuce, peas and rocket, all of which benefit from cooler weather and plenty of moisture.
During the winter we planted 30 more apple stepovers in fluid lines adding a contemporary twist to a very traditional fruit-growing method. We now have many traditional varieties of apple that in autumn go straight from the tree into the fruit bowls in the hotel rooms, on the breakfast table and into desserts. 
At Jesmond Dene House, the garden plays a vital role in helping our guests to feel welcome and relaxed. We love to see people using the garden spaces, whether it’s a quick stretch of the legs after a business meeting, diners admiring the borders from the terrace or investigating the veg patch to gain clues as to what might be on the menu. Our smart new oak benches provide another opportunity to sit and catch some late afternoon sun. We sometimes even supply toys to keep the children entertained, albeit unintentionally - one morning in late spring, we found all our neat labels marking the rows of newly-sown sorrel had been re-arranged by little hands. It hasn’t affected our crop though – the sorrel is now thriving.
It was an intimidating task to try to impress our Dutch hotel manager with a display of flowering bulbs that could never rival the beauty of the tulip fields of Holland. But he did appreciate our smaller-scale planting of daffodils, tulips and other bulbs that brought vibrant colour to our borders this year. From February onwards the colourful flowers emerging from the soil have been evidence of the bulb planting programme which we undertook last autumn. Bulbs are very useful for adding interest at times when shrubs and perennials aren’t flowering. The small Narcissus ‘Tête à Tête’ flowered with Iris reticulata and winter aconites in February. These were followed by over 600 of the larger trumpet daffodil bulbs that flowered in time for Mothers’ day. Later still we make the most of tulips, alliums, lilies and dahlias. These don’t just add colour to our borders, but are also used in arrangements inside the hotel.