Oh Tuckshop Gardener, where have you been? I've been at the NEC to get flowers seen....

A pyjamaish slow start to the morning.  Luxury! And time, at last, to put my fingers to the keyboard.

From this..... to this..... with lots of the co-operation and camaraderie typical of flower growers it seems!

to this.....

It's nearly two weeks since the maelstrom began, setting up our West Midlands Flowers from the Farm stand at the NEC for RHS BBC Gardener's World Live.  Having only attended the show as a visitor before, I had no idea what the exhibitors' experience would be, but having now come out of the other side of it, I feel nothing but positive about it.  It was absolutely fantastic, if exhausting!

Luckily, as we were showcasing British grown cut flowers, we didn't have quite the same stress levels as we would've had designing a show garden - at least with cut flowers, you can harvest only the ones which are looking great and pop them into position - not quite the same tricky business as trying to bring on plants to exactly the right stage of flowering in time for the show.  Just trying to do that for plants to fill our hamper and wheelbarrow displays was difficult enough!  Out of the three foxgloves potted up, only one chose to co-operate and put a flower spike up at the right time. Grrrrr.

Working closely with other local growers from the group was great - it was brilliant to get together with familiar faces again, and to meet new growers who haven't yet managed to make it to any of our West Midlands meetings.  Penny of Wayside Flowers, and Maria of The Flower Patch were invaluable in helping to organise the show and kept me going through thick and thin - I think our blend of skills and personalities made us something of a killer team!  Penny was calm and practical, and brought prior experience of exhibiting at the NEC on a corporate level to the table, Maria (and her family) was a treasure trove of handiness - knocking up blackboards, designing posters and leading the charge (voiceless, as it disappeared during the course of the show) during 'have a go' buttonhole sessions with visitors.  And then there was me - a bit Tiggerish in my over-enthusiasm at times, but dragging all and sundry in my wake.  Thanks to all who allowed themselves to be dragged (Polly, Judith, Kate, Jayne and Heather), to More By Design for the loan of the splendid chairs and to my mum for all her flower-related needlework.  

Visitors were really taken with the stand, and our information postcards about Flowers From the Farm disappeared as quickly as we could replenish supplies, obviously there's a lot of interest in locally grown flowers out there!  Asking visitors if they had heard of the organisation and its work, there was something of a mixed response - some had spotted us in the media previously, but for others we were the first point of contact.  After being bombarded by enthusiastic growers, lots of people left knowing more about British cut flowers than when they arrived!

Our scented displays of relaxed country flowers were also snapped up as fast as we could scribble reservation names on labels on the final day, and several people told us "You're the best stand here". The RHS judges almost agreed, giving us second place in a beauty contest which we newbies didn't even realise we were part of.  I subsequently discovered that meant we'd won a prize of £200 which will be used for expenses for future shows now that we've discovered what we're capable of - a massive increase on our budget of unlimited goodwill which generated the impressive display above.  First prize in our sights next year??!!

Even managed to catch up with old friends, Urban Herbs and to cheer an exhausted looking Kate with a flower crown in the final hours of the final day!

Lena from BBC2 Big Allotment Challenge visits 

Toby Buckland looking a little scary at the Gardeners' World Theatre next door to our stand. Sorry Toby!

Onwards and upwards

As you might surmise from the hiatus in blog posts, the world of Tuckshop Flowers is getting busier and busier as I frantically sow both literal and figurative seeds.  Above is a photo of the 100% Brummie event flowers supplied to Birmingham City University earlier this week for their Student Awards Ceremony.

In the literal world, I hope I'm coming to the end of the period where the propagator is a fixture on my kitchen worktop - as the weather gets warmer, the greenhouse should suffice to germinate even the most recalcitrant seed.  But those consistently warm days have not yet quite arrived and I had to have an emergency run down to the allotment with a roll of horticultural fleece to do some cosmos safeguarding on a chilly night earlier in the week.  You'll be pleased to hear there were no casualties due to frost.  Slugs have, however,  chomped all my dark 'Dazzler' seedlings in the Tuckshop garden, while leaving the white 'Psyche' variety untouched.  Haven't tried a taste test myself, so have no idea why it should be so.

In the figurative world, I'm preparing to exhibit at BBC Gardeners' World Live at the NEC, heading up the the Flowers from the Farm team.  Daunting, but exciting and a brilliant opportunity to reach a wider public with the British flowers message.  Hopefully the stand will also encourage a few people  to find the flowery path in future years too!  (And here's a discount code for tickets.)

British FlowersWeek, organised by New Covent Garden flower market  is also peeking just over the horizon from 15th-19th June, hot on the heels of Gardeners' World Live. For this celebration of British grown blooms,  I'm teaming up with the very funky More By Design, an interiors shop in my new favourite haunt, Birmingham's iconic Custard Factory.  More By Design are hosting my pop-up of locally grown arrangements, and I'm also going to do a few larger designs for their window display.

The shop team, Abbie and Heather have got equally over-excited about British Flowers Week and have just commissioned their designers to produce a range of greetings cards to accompany the event.  Wow - how things snowball!!  Will post a link when one becomes available.

And now I must go to sort out my plans for DIY wedding flowers next week, and for my 'Dying Matters' display for next Friday's event with A Natural Undertaking.  All systems go!

Putting away winter

Usually February is a fallow time, with only mental gardening to while away the drizzly dank days.  My long silence on the blog is an indicator that this February has been far from quiet - it started with meeting up with other growers at the beginning of the month to hatch plans to mark British Flowers Week in June, progressed to an application for a stand at a Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) show, and finished this week with meeting other local(ish) members of the British Flower Collective, followed by a giving a talk on cutting gardens to a local gardening club.  And all of this was punctuated by Valentines Day, and a rush of funeral flowers for both natural burials and traditional funerals.

Today felt like a day off, with nothing to rush off to, so made the most of this welcome hiatus by planting out my September sown cornflowers into the borders.  They're such sturdy plants now that I can't see the point in potting them on again - I think it's time to let them get out into the big wide world after spending their juvenile years penned up in a cold, draughty greenhouse.

I'm slowly working my way around the garden, clearing away the dead stems of dried out perennials from last year, cutting back the dog-legged stems of roses and dreaming of where to plant my many new roses.

At least the garden looks like it is almost getting ready to do something.  Fat buds are forming on the hazel (which I think I'm going to chop right down to ground level as I don't want a tree, but the long straight wands it will throw up after being coppiced would make handy supports for lots of my plants).  The mature hazels at the allotment have been a brilliant resource this month when making bouquets - their dangling yellow catkins are wonderful combined with spring flowers in a bunch.

Catkins and ivy berries add texture to these spring buttonholes

Tulips are poking their noses out of the earth in my big zinc tub, and the ones which still remain in the raised bed, over planted with ranunculus and protected by horticultural fleece are really starting to motor into growth.  Funny, as I could have sworn I'd dug most of them out in autumn to make way for the ranunculus.  I'm obviously not as ruthless as I thought.

Only 3 more days to go until March, but I'm not going to sow too many seeds too early - just don't have the indoor space to keep them going until May, so better to delay for a couple of weeks more yet.  It's a bit like being held on the starting blocks once the 1st of March clicks into place on the calendar.

It's been a busy start to the year, so here's hoping it continues in the same vein!

Favourite containers

By now, you all know my fetish for old china teacups, but it's hard to pin down one favourite container for flowers.  In this post, I'm inviting you to post pictures of your own alternatives to the glass vase - so come and join in the fun….

I'm just experimenting with setting up a blog on my Tuckshop Flowers website, so this is where you'll find the post.  Bear with me as I work all the tech-y bits out!

Click here: Blog - Tuckshop Flowers

Happy New Year from a happy flower grower

Another year is here.  What will it bring, I wonder?  Lots of flowers and a new growing space would be top of my wish list (along with a polytunnel and more local business links in 2015).

It's funny how the year passes in a whirl of activity from March til December but as soon as the New Year's Eve celebrations are over and Christmas put away for another 12 months, my fingers and mind itch to get started on the next growing year.  My second seed order was placed last week and my mind is now constantly roaming over what new cutting varieties I'm going to find space for in the coming months.


I am, however, fully intending to remain strong and bolt down my seed packets until March - not a lot of point in making early sowings until the daylight levels are extended with the imminent arrival of spring.  I made an exception for a very late sowing of self-collected sweet pea seeds yesterday, which I've put in my unheated porch as I need red sweet peas for late May wedding flowers in Birmingham.  I will have to murmur words of encouragement to the sproutlings on a regular basis… and hope that a lot of them are indeed red like about 50% of the parent plants.

This will be one of my first bright coloured weddings with hot oranges, yellows and reds.  Nearly all wedding requests to date have been for pastels and blush shades, so it is nice to have something different.  I'm providing the bride with buckets of flowers which friends and family will arrange for the wedding themselves.  A lovely idea to get people involved in the day - and one of the ways I got started on this path myself, so you never know, I might even germinate some more local flower folk!  My first DIY wedding flowers order, so it will be interesting to see how it all works.

Photo courtesy The Great British Florist

It's been lovely to meet so many other local growers in 2014 as part of my role as regional co-ordinator for Flowers from the Farm, a network of British flower growers nationwide.  We had our first West Midlands meeting in January, and have met up every couple of months as a group ever since, but nearby flowery neighbours met via this route are seen regularly.  Being part of something bigger has been good for developing my expertise and my network - I now know who I can call on for more supplies and helping hands, whilst all the time keeping things local!  Judith of Pollen Floral Joy has become a key ally for moral support and is a very handy brain to pick for ideas and collaborative projects like our crowning of Bully, Birmingham's iconic Bullring bull for British Flowers week in June.

Knowing there are other people out there, willing to share growing and business expertise is invaluable and makes single-handed self-employment much less like being a horticultural hermit.  Far from it. Flower growing has thrown me into a generous world full of green-fingered folk and I'm loving every minute of it.

January sees me resolve yet again to get my allotment shipshape - my half plot section is already something like ready, with beds weeded and covered with weed suppressing membrane to hold back the insidious self seeders and their bid for world domination.  The scruffy big plot however, still needs some serious attention and as ever, I vow that this year I will get the path layout right to enable better access across the plot.  I've got a massive heap of woodchippings which I scrounged from tree surgeons working in the neighbourhood, and I plan to press this handy waste product into service, laid down over some cardboard in the alleys which I earmark for paths.  I sense a whole lot of earthmoving coming on.  Let's hope for a drier winter than 2014 if it is all going to get done before planting starts in spring.

What jobs have you prioritised on your plot for this year?

I wish you all a happy, fruitful and floriferous 2015.

It's beginning to look a lot like wreathmas….

A long lapse since my last post - my life seems to have been consumed by round things and Christmas markets!  So to give you a peek at what I've been up to, here are a few glimpses to put you in the picture:

Making fresh Christmas wreaths for local delivery. Here's one I made earlier.

Running wreath making workshops

Selling at Christmas markets in South Birmingham

What's it like to be a flower grower in winter?

Brrrrr…….. Luckily this is not the scene just yet….

I was recently asked by Modern Mint, a Essex-based landscape gardening company and curators of garden writing, to contribute a guest post to their blog on this topic.

So for this week's blog entry, we need to wander over to their site…. (click here)

Mossing a wreath base

or just book a workshop with Tuckshop Flowers!

Wreath making: Willow from the wigloo

Christmas is coming and the wigloo's getting hairy…..

So it was off to join the Friends of Cotteridge Park on one of their weekly Sunday morning maintenance missions to tame the sproutings.  With loppers and secateurs in hand, Judith, of Pollen Floral Joy, and I squelched over the boggy grass to do some serious snippage in the late autumn sunshine.  Yes we are kind ladies, but not entirely altruistic ones.  We wanted willow, and we wanted lots….  Why?  To twist into wreath bases just in time for Christmas…. 

I've just signed up for another Christmas market, so its time to get twisty with those supple willow wands, and make circlets of the lovely green, flexible stems.  Some will have dried ingredients added, some might get mossed, and some might just get sprayed and glittered - a range of fates await them…

Working with willow is quite addictive as it is so versatile.  Bending and twisting the wands back into tidier tunnel and igloo shapes was incredibly satisfying.  After an hour of chopping and twisting, the wigloo looked a little tamer but it has filled my head with ideas of woven shelters for my own garden.  Maybe I'll stab a few willow whips into the ground and see if they take root of their own accord...

Heaven knows we came back with plenty of them!  Plenty to go round for my wreath workshops. I've already turned some into bases of various sizes ranging from the tiniest dolls house front door wreaths (napkin rings??) to monsters of about 80cm in diameter.

A dark dahlia late summer wedding

Photo courtesy of MartinCartwright

A dark, almost mahogany Rip City dahlia drew excited squeaks of delight from a passer by at Stirchley Community Market, one sunny summer evening.  Chatting with the emitter of said squeaks, it transpired she was Kate, and bride-to-be of my market neighbour Andrew – a.k.a.  purveyor of fine culinary delights,  ‘Urban Herbs’. 

Kate had previously fallen so deeply, darkly in love with these velvety dahlias, that she had already chosen the dusty antique colour of her bridesmaid dresses specifically to tone with them – hence her squeaks on spotting my Rip Cities.

Talking serious flowers a few weeks later at the Tuckshop, she described the wild and natural bunches she had in mind to decorate her informal country wedding at the beautiful Wethele Manor, near Leamington Spa, in Warwickshire – a perfect fit for the homegrown, ‘just picked’ style of my flowers.  I love it when ‘wild’ is part of a bride’s vocabulary  because then I know I have found my perfect customer.  And Kate was indeed a pleasure to work with as, apart from her obsession with dark dahlias, she was exceedingly laid back and open to the many ideas we swapped via our shared Pinterest board. 

Pinterest is surely a tool designed for florists!  It’s a perfect way to create a scrapbook of ideas, to get feedback from the bride-to-be and is a bit like climbing into someone else’s imagination: a brilliant tool to find out what feel, which style and colours float the bridal boat.

With dahlias and budget decided upon,  we opted to double up the bridesmaid posies as reception table flowers and designed them to be the perfect size to pop into trimmed jam jars just before the meal. 

Photos courtesy of Martin Cartwright

We also chose to keep the table flowers simple – floating dahlia heads in bright, almost Indian colours, with candles in glass bowls.

Photos courtesy of MartinCartwright

As a tribute to Andrew’s day job, I wanted to work herbs into the flowers, so we had the vibrant blue of borage in the table bowls, scented lemon balm foliage in the bride and bridesmaid posies, and Kate supplied me with a couple of deliciously scented blackcurrant sage plants from which to pluck the diminutive shocking pink flowers to complement the dark dahlia buttonhole for the groom.

 Photos courtesy of Martin Cartwright

Photo courtesy of Kate and Andrew

Kate had been to see me when I was at the height of flower crown frenzy, just before my stall at CocoMad, a local music festival.  She was infected by my enthusiasm and was easily persuaded that a floral tiara was exactly what she needed! Like me on my own wedding day, she wanted something light and small.  But whilst I ended up with a mid-size shrubbery, pruned to size with kitchen scissors before the ceremony, Kate got a simple gypsophila circlet with a narrow satin ribbon tie.  With her unfussy, elegant dress, it completed her look to perfection.

Photo courtesy of Martin Cartwright

When I arrived at the Wethele Manor to dress the tables, I loved the famous couples theme which Kate and Andrew had chosen to identify the tables for their guests. I think Gomez and Morticia would approve of the gothic blackberries and ivy which garlanded the top table for the bridal party, and those dark dahlias, of course!

photo by Tuckshop Flowers

                     

 The day was captured beautifully by friends of the bride and groom and  by photographer, Martin Cartwright  -  I’m delighted to share some of their lovely shots, so thanks go to them, and to Kate and Andy for being a joy to work with throughout the whole proceedings.  May you flourish and prosper together, along with your Urban Herbs!

Photo courtesy of Martin Cartwright

Sliding into autumn

Outside the first grey skies of October are dumping, at last, significant rain onto the garden after a very dry September.  This morning my radiators even came on, reminding me that we really are heading deeper into autumn.  The dahlias are starting to look like girls returning home from a heavy night out - a bit bedraggled with deceased hairdos  and looking generally the worse for wear.  Foliage is coming into its own and the ivies are flowering like mad things, which is always great for the bees.

And, I'll let you into a secret.  I've got chrysanths in my greenhouse.  Oh yes I have.  Never thought I'd see the day when the scourge of the garage forecourt became part of my growing plans. They have resulted from a combination of several things - a desire for some late autumn flowers, a big buzz about them on the Britishflowers twitter hour last autumn, but mainly the fact that they were selling these particular plants off cheap at the garden centre earlier in the year.

And you know what…. I actually quite like them. Not that I'll be able to find them again, as they were surely mislabelled.  I bought them thinking I was buying a tray of reflexed globular Japanese style 'mums in a deep shade of russet orange, but instead, I have a combination of flatter, slightly spiky burnt orange blooms and some off pink lovelies which are just starting to open.  I adore the colour tints on these pink ones and can't wait to get some stems snipped for some arrangements just for me…

At least now I know what to put on my list when my plans for floral world domination extend to incorporate a polytunnel….

The Janus-headed gardener

I'm gearing up for my last flowery market of the season on Saturday.  It all feels very autumnal with hydrangeas and dahlias in their rich colours, along with hips, haws and other berries.

But just as I'm looking at the end of my market stall year, I'm looking at the start of the next season, planting daffodils and alliums for next spring and sowing hardy annuals in the greenhouse.  So far, my cornflowers have been amazing - up and at 'em just two days after sowing!!  Calendula, scabious and a grass which is new to me - agrostis Nebulosa - are all zooming along, trying to keep up with their neighbours.  Ranunculus which I planted in the greenhouse border are also putting up their first tentative leaves and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a good spring crop next year.

I've got anemone 'Galilee' corms winging their way to me via Royal Mail as we speak; tulips resting patiently til November in the cool, dark garage, and the allotment seed catalogue calling loudly to me from the living room.  I think didiscus is going to be my new flower to try in 2015 as I fell in love with it at a recent meeting of flower growers when I saw it in the flesh.

2014 has been a good year for Tuckshop Flowers and we seem to have poked our flowery heads a little further above the parapet into the public consciousness.  Hopefully all these seedlings that I'm nurturing now will find a good home in a new patch of land in 2015 so that I can grow my business even further.

Picking autumn raspberries at the allotment yesterday, it didn't feel like two minutes since the start of spring, and yet there I was, along with other plot holders, clearing out finished crops and doing the first bits of winter digging.

But before we get to next spring, we have a spot of wreath-making to do over the Christmas period, so I'd better toughen up my hands and keep a beady eye out for wreath ingredients.

Amused by being a muse!

I've just been given a lovely thank you from one of my customers who picked up a bunch from my farmers' market stall.  She'd forgotten her purse, but as she was someone I knew, I told her not to worry about it and we'd settle up some other time.  So off she went with a small jam jar posy to put on her kitchen table.

Not only did I get payment, I also got this:

A lovely interpretation of her bunch, made by her mother-in-law on an iPad.  I don't think I've ever seen a picture where I know each element so intimately and was delighted to see that my flowers inspired such creativity - proof that it's not just me that thinks they're beautiful!  I really love it and all that remains is for me to find it a suitable frame and location.  Now I'll  have to give her another bunch, to say thank you in return.  Do you think this cycle could just keep going?

From seed to stall.

Gardening for one of my clients yesterday, we got chatting about jobs and the bits of them that we don't see.  Her husband is a retired gemologist and used to choose the raw stones to be cut and set by one of Birmingham's fine jewellery companies.  It's a long journey from a lump of rock to a finely cut sapphire and we were musing on how little we think about what goes into the various end products that we use or wear everyday - and its the same with a bunch of flowers.

When my stall is set up for markets, people constantly murmur and exclaim about how pretty it all looks (and smells, if I'm not set up next to a generator or sausage stall!!) and that, I guess, is combined result the loveliness of flowers, and the art of presenting them.  But behind that visual appeal, what makes them different from other flower stalls?

Firstly, they are all locally grown - cut the night before market and kept in the cool and dark to be fully hydrated before being arranged early the next day.  Secondly, they are different because I can offer varieties which aren't currently commercially grown on a huge scale because they're more delicate and don't travel brilliantly well - cornflowers have flown out of my buckets in the past few markets.  And thirdly, I love them!  I know their names, and in many cases I've watched them grow from seedlings, picked them, arranged them  and I'm sending them forth into the world to spread the word about British flowers.

I had a huge smile on my face at the last market when a gentleman, who'd bought a bunch of cornflowers and tansy daisies as  one of my first customers of the day, came rushing back half an hour later saying that they'd looked so gorgeous in his house that he come back for more flowers for his kitchen!    The two florists who've used them for wedding photo shoots recently have both said that my flowers had also stolen the show from their commercial counterparts, attracting universal oohs and aahs about their natural charms.

But it makes me smile, somewhat wryly, when people call them 'wild flowers' - having them on the stall (and in the garden) involves a bit more than a happy accident!  I know they mean that the flowers look natural, relaxed and just gorgeous in themselves, with that freshly picked feel (that's because they are).

So I thought I'd share the market day of some Tuckshop Flowers:

The evening before market, as the day fades and cools, the best blooms are picked and inspected, then left to fully hydrate in  water overnight.

Very early next morning- arranging and bunching begins - with a fortifying cup of tea.

 8.30am - the welcoming sights and smells of Tuckshop Flowers are ready for market opening time.

Come rain, come shine, the market bustles and there's lots of chat to be had about flowers with interested customers.

Any leftovers get labelled up with my details on lovely new cards (from Moo) and are sent out to work to do some marketing for me. They're delivered to hand-picked local cafes to spread the word about British flowers so when the last delivery of the day is done, finally it's time for sit down with a well-earned cup of tea!   And I wouldn't have things any other way…..

I've just ordered a copy of 'Gilding the Lily' - a book about the journey of imported cut flowers to market, and I think it is going to be a very different kind of read from the one above.

Wordless Wednesday - Glorious June

On being a flower ninja

I'm a flower ninja.

Today I planned and staged a stealth attack on Bully, the Bullring's favourite son, and snazzed him up with a rosy crown to celebrate British Flowers Week. Eat your heart out Lana Del Rey.

Along with my fellow ninja, Judith, I sneaked through the city centre, secreting posies around Brummie landmarks as part of the Lonely Bouquet initiative.  Like wartime evacuees , the flowers were sent forth with cardboard labels round their necks, asking to be rehomed. So far I know that one of them has ended up in Warwickshire, delighting the shopper who found it on her birthday; and another posy has come home to roost not more than a mile from me.  I await news of the other lost souls.

With my twitter fingers recovering from their overtime, and febrile Facebooking leaving me limp, I'm left happy and slightly knackered, reflecting on a brilliant day.  I can't think of a nicer way to conduct marketing or to bring a smile to people's faces.  And great fun to work with another flowerbod on the project too, so thanks again go to Mrs Pollen Floral Joy.

British Flowers are just gorgeous and it wasn't hard to spread a bit of Mrs Pollen and the Tuckshops' flowery delight.  I know we ninjas were infected by it too.

Photo courtesy of Pollen Floral Joy