I've written posts about growing hydrangeas {here} and dahlias {here} but I feel like I've promised you this post on roses for the past couple of summers and haven't got around to it! This Spring, as I was planting two new roses out that I got as Birthday presents, I finally took some photos and then looked back through my archives to find lots of my favourite rose photos. You see, roses are one of my favourite ever flowers to grow and are definitely the easiest and lowest maintenance out of hydrangeas and dahlias. Yes, they might cost a little more to begin but they don't have to, and once planted, should last for years and years giving you at least one full set of blooms every year. I thought I'd put together all of the tips I've learnt from growing roses over the past six or so years....

It's Halloween tomorrow {!!} and it's suddenly just crept up on me. If you know anything at all about me, I'm sure you know what a huge pumpkin lover I am. In fact, just a huge halloween lover in general. Spooky houses, fun costumes, pumpkins and pumpkin spice everything please. I'm slow in blog writing this October {have probably spent too much time on Instagram instead...} so please forgive me, but I wanted to get these photos up before this month of the pumpkin ends.

A long, overdue catch up post on our allotment this year. I think this is our fifth summer with it?! And we love it more than ever. To have our own piece of land to nurture and cultivate, to switch off from everything, to sow and to water and to harvest. My favourite part is the harvesting but we just love spending time there. It feels different to our garden and it's an evening ritual to walk there most days. Everybody asks how we find the time, it's very much Ben's project so I can't really take much credit other than choosing what to grow and picking the produce! But it doesn't take too much once it gets going. It's his version of going to the gym, I go running, he goes to the allotment. This year with the hot weather it's gone CRAZY. Most things are flourishing, the paths are overflowing. Luckily it's next to a river so the water table has remained high enough that we don't need to stress about watering everything all the time. If you're new to allotmenting or this blog, you can find all of my past posts on it here, here, here and here. This is more of a photo catch up from the season so far for us to look back upon, and that you might want to have a look at if you're into that kind of thing...

Last week I took Ben for a bit of a different date at Belmond's Le Manoir Aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire. It's somewhere that's been on our bucket list for a long time with our love of both food and gardening. Famed for Raymond Blanc of course, the two michelin starred restaurant and expansive kitchen gardens which were way ahead of their time before the trend for growing your own produce came about. As well as the restaurant and it's famous Raymond Blanc cookery school, there's also the Gardening School which we were there for to learn more about growing our own vegetables and make the most of our allotment plot.

A few of you have got in touch to ask about our greenhouse! I haven't shared much with it since it was finished last September but her first growing season is fully underway. You can see how it was built in this post here but lots of you wanted to know how we use it. So I thought I'd share our first year with it so far... 

Is there anything that screams October and Halloween more than pumpkins do? And is there anything more instagrammable for those autumnal few weeks of the year more than the mini white variety? If you know anything at all about me it's probably that I'm pretty mad on this time of year {one of the reasons we're flying to New York tomorrow is for their fall celebrations and pumpkin farms} and in particular growing pumpkins ourself at our allotment. I've been posting photos of our harvest recently and been getting so many messages asking if I'll write a blog post about how to grow them. So here are my tips, talking every stage of the growing process along with all of our favourite types, which incidentally have super cute names, from Baby Boo to Jack be Little to Crown Prince.

Happy Friday! I'm excited to share some photos of a shoot that Binky Nixon came to do a few weeks back if you'd like to see? I guess you all know just how much of a thing for photos I have. This blog is built upon it. I'm not skilled technically at taking photos myself but I just love how much a photograph can capture. So much more than my mind can ever remember, looking back at them always makes me smile and to have a set of professional images that captures everything that I love is really special.

I go through stages of cooking. Sometimes feeling really inspired and knocking up new exciting dinners, a spring in my step as I go. Other times I feel at a loss for inspiration and just can't seem to think past three or four regular dinners on repeat or it feels like a real chore. Not having a proper kitchen for about 6 months certainly took it's toll so since May and us having a brand new sparkly place to cook, I've felt my love for food come flooding back. It's also coincided with my favourite time of year for cooking, summery al fresco light dinners that don't take forever slaving over a stove. I feel like I'm so much healthier at this time of year too. It's been perfect timing with the allotment just coming into her prime with courgettes and kale suddenly coming out of our ears! Recipe blog posts are probably the most requested type of posts at the moment through Instagram stories where I share snippets of what I'm cooking most nights. So here's a quick post with some of our favourite things to eat right now;

Hello Friday! It's been forever since I wrote one of these weekend/week round up posts. But this weekend deserves to be celebrated because after a week of feeling really quite under the weather {the first cold of the season has really knocked me for six}, I'm starting to feel much better and I'm so excited for a chilled out weekend with my love. We have nowhere in particular to be so can just see what we feel like doing. I'm hoping to sleep in after a few nights of broken sleep and a busy week. And also HELLO AUTUMN. After what felt like an endless summer with hot sunny days, I'm really loving the darker cosier nights with new jumpers to wear, new throws to snuggle up under and all the apples and pumpkins that this season brings. The light has been amazing this week as the sun gets lower and the trees start to almost glow.

I'm long overdue an allotment post and er, this is a pretty long one.. {remember this one from last summer and the original post here}. It's something that I don't often post about on Instagram or the blog but it really does play such a big part in our day to day life. It's become a ritual to walk there before or after dinner and at the moment it's overflowing with fresh pickings. This is our third year, and summer, with it and considering that we've been rather busy with the house renovations this year {and probably put the least amount of effort in so far} it's amazing just how well everything has done. It's the fullest it's ever been, I think we could do with an extension already! Crazy considering we were so overwhelmed with the size of it when we began. 

Around this time last year, I wrote this post on creating a mini cutting garden using just a few packets of seeds and some compost. We have both our garden {posts here and here} and the allotment {posts here and here} to utilise for a cutting garden, although this year with moving I think we'll be planting most seeds at the allotment until we've sorted the new garden out! Over the last couple of weekends we've started sorting out all of our packets of seeds {top tip, at the end of summer buy up all the garden centres reduced seeds, all of ours were just 50p per pack, even the Sarah Raven pretties!} and have started planting. This year.. 

Yay it's Springtime and seed planting season again, a whole summer of pretty cut flowers is just around the corner. I've grown a few types of flowers from seed over the past few years {sweet peas and cosmos mainly} but this year I've decided to go even further and make a small cutting flower patch on the allotment. It's amazing just how many flowers you'll get even from just a couple of packets of seeds and little bit of time invested now. Last year, after shoving some sweet pea seeds into some soil at this time I had huge bunches of flowers, every other day for over eight weeks! You have to keep cutting them, filling your kitchen with prettiness and their amazing scent. When I wrote our garden post last year a few of you asked for a guide of when to plant things. So this is the time to plant most seeds, go buy some compost, have a read of this mini guide and get planting!

Last January, we got a call from our local allotment to say that a plot had come up for rent if we were still interested. Ben had put our names down at the end of 2013 as his Mum has an allotment there and it was just a two minute walk away from our house. I wasn't too bothered either way, sure it would be lovely to grow some fresh produce as we love eating healthy, I love to cook and we both love being outside but most allotments have a waiting list of up to five years and we had loads going on last year with a wedding to finish planning and I didn't know if we'd have enough time. So I kind of thought we would never have a chance of getting one and didn't give it much thought. But Ben was super excited when a large plot was available and he promised he'd do most of the work, so we took it for the grand total of £15 rent a year! Bargain. 23A was now ours. It was a big plot but mostly covered in grass and generally looked unloved when we took it over, the previous owner was old and had been ill for a while. It had an old shed that was falling down and had so much vine weed and cooch grass to dig up. But within a couple of months we had transformed it and had more produce than we knew what to do with by the end of the summer! Ben is well and truly hooked, it's not always my first choice on where to spend a weekend, and without gloves your manicure is ruined but I've really really loved our first year of allotmenting.