Spring is probably my favourite of the seasons, although I love them all for different reasons, you just can’t beat the excitement and anticipation that comes with spring. Signs of life popping up everywhere, longer evenings and warmer days, narcissi (!) all the good stuff. It has always been incredibly warm, unusually sunny and dry the past couple of weeks which has made for a particularly pleasant introduction to spring. One of the things we are blessed with in spring in narcissi - the most underrated and beautiful flower. A favourite of mine.

I thought I would share some of the beauties I have growing here in the garden. All so different but perfect in their own frilly, ruffly ways. And there is still many more to come!!!

After my week with Days of Dahlia on their sustainable floristry course, my creative juices were flowing so I was eager to have a play with a handful of stems from the garden and my trusty flower frog.

Now for a little update on the flower field as prepped as I can on a minimal budget! I have bought myself a small polytunnel from a company called Feel Good and I’m really impressed with the quality of it - its only small but it means I can finally stop sowing all my seeds in our sunroom which had ran out of space for any more seed trays!

Inside the polytunnel, I have lots and lots of seeds growing, for any fellow flower growing nerds out there, here’s a list off the top of my head:

Achillea
Snapdragons
Sweet peas
Nasturtium
Lavatera
Rudbekia
Feverfew
Calendula
Cosmos
Delphinium
Linonium
Ammi
Strawflowers

And there’s more but that list is getting a bit long for a blog post! I am SO excited for them all to grow and I’m getting very impatient about putting them outside. This is my first year growing flowers for cutting though so I’m trying to remind myself that it can’t be rushed!

Elsewhere in the field I have been making lots of flower beds, some with wooden raised edges and some without. I had planned to make them all raised beds because I was worried about water logging / poor soil but I decided to bite the bullet and make some standard ones without wooden sides. They are no dig beds made by putting cardboard down followed by a big mound of soil, so they aren’t far off the depth of the raised ones anyway.

I’m slowly adding paths of wood shreddings between the beds to tidy it up and supress the weeds but its taking a while as I’m just using my neighbours shredder and branches that have come from neighbours gardens being cleared. I will probably splash out on a bag of bark soon to finish up the rest.

The big news at Holly Grows this week is that I have been blessed by the flower farming gods and found myself a second hand (proper) polytunnel for free!!! A lovely girl I follow on instagram posted to say she was getting rid of the one that came with her house and I managed to get in there quick enough to bagsy it for myself!

I am over the moon and can’t believe my luck! It needs reskinned but the frame all looks great and its going to give me so much more possibilities for growing and hopefully extend the end of my growing season. Now I just need to work out how to dismantle it, fit it in my partners van, and then put it up again in the flower field!

Hopefully by the time my next blog goes out I will have it all built and looking pretty to show you.

My narcissi have been begun blooming over the past few weeks and it has been a total delight, I had forgotten what kinds of bulbs I had planted so theres’s been an added element of surprise as well which is fun.

9th April 2025 - basking in narcissi, my mini polytunnel, a free polytunnel, and lots of seeds