We Cleared the Whole Bed in One Day | A Day in the Garden

It’s July, which I refuse to believe, and for once the sky’s gone grey on me. I’m not complaining. We’ve had weeks of sun up here, a proper Scottish heatwave, the kind where everyone you meet tells you to make the most of it whilst melting. It’s beautiful to look at.

It is not beautiful to garden in. I don’t do my best work in the heat, so we’ve mostly been hiding indoors, and now the cloud’s rolled in I can finally get back out and do something useful.

The plan today is the second triangle. We’ve got four triangular beds, and this one’s been sitting there full of brambles since before we moved in. Today it gets dug. All of it. It’s going to take a few hours and I’ve made my peace with that.

Before I get filthy, let me show you what’s actually working, because for once quite a lot of it is.

We’ve planted all the way around the circle now, and the border’s properly coming into its own. The big border is steaming with cottage flowers. I keep saying it looks like Miss Honey’s garden.

The herb box is looking great. My sleepy tea herbs are nearly ready to start picking. I’m just waiting on the calendula to open up a bit more, and then we can start collecting it.

The pears are coming in full force. This is going to be a serious harvest. I think I’m going to end up doing about a hundred recipes with pears just to keep up, so consider that a warning.

The strawberries in the pot are doing nicely.

They’ll be moving into the second triangle soon, once I’ve actually cleared it. And these, the yellow roses, last year we had two flowers. Two. This year there are tons of them, which I love, because yellow roses were my grandma’s favourite.

In the greenhouse the grapes are going mad, much like the pears. There’s grape juice in our future, I can feel it. The roof’s held up beautifully since we patched it, which I’m very proud of.

The tomatoes are finally setting a bit of fruit. I see a lot of canning and a lot of marinara in the short future. We’ve got lemon balm and spring onion in pots, basil, chives, and the pepper plants have finally decided to grow after taking their sweet time. Some of these tomatoes were grown from Morrisons own-brand tomatos and I took out the seeds, by the way.

This is the first triangle. Cauliflower, butternut squash, courgette, broccoli, and butter lettuces that are nearly ready for their first cut. Apparently they grow back after that, so we’ll find out together. The potatoes are doing well, all except the Rooster, which has me sulking I’m not going to lie. So those are coming out and something else is going in.

People ask how we afford any of this, and the honest answer is mostly we don’t, not yet. The cottage is a hundred and eighty years old and needs about a hundred and eighty thousand things doing to it, and the money for that doesn’t exist right now. So we’re building the income to match the dream slowly.

There’s remote work, there’s the digital products, there’s the novels, which are the thing I actually want to be doing with my life if I’m being honest about it. And there’s eBay I’ve just started.

I got back into reselling recently. When my dad was ill, near the end of the six years I spent looking after him, eBay quite literally paid for our food shop most weeks. I’ve never forgotten that. So now I’m trying to build it into something steadier. A thousand pounds a month is the goal. We’ll see how that goes. I like the work, which helps.

Right. No more avoiding it.

So this is the second triangle, and I cannot stress enough how many brambles are in here. I keep finding more. I pull one out and three of its cousins appear. I am genuinely starting to think this bed has been growing brambles since the Victorians built the place.

 It’s just hours of bending over, hauling roots out, and trying not to think about how warm it’s getting even under cloud.

And there it is. It’s done.

How good is that. A few hours ago this was a bramble fortress, and now it’s clear, turned over, ready to go. Replanted all the strawberry plants in it. From what it was this morning, I’m really pleased with that.

I’ll put wood around the edges in another day, hoe it through, and get some veg in. In a few days this whole thing will be planted up. I just need to keep this pace, which is, historically, the part I’m worst at.

This is all a very slow process. The cottage, the homestead, the income, all of it. None of it happens in one video and none of it happens overnight. But the garden’s a good reminder that slow is fine. You clear a bed, you plant a thing, you wait, and one day there are tons of yellow roses where last year there were two.

I’ll get there. We’ll get there.

A Little Note About My Images ♡

You'll notice that the images across my blog are a mixture of my own photography and AI-generated images.

I'm a one-woman band running this little corner of the internet, without a team of photographers, designers or editors behind me. Living with OCD also means I can be particularly careful about things like copyright and image permissions, so I sometimes use AI to help bring my ideas to life without those additional worries.

Where possible, I love sharing my own photographs, especially glimpses of my cottage, garden and everyday life here in Scotland. Other times, I'll use AI-generated imagery to illustrate an idea or provide a little creative inspiration.

I believe in being transparent, so I wanted you to know that you'll find a mixture of both throughout my website. The words, experiences, opinions and ideas are my own.

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