The soft fruit is ripening up nicely now. Here’s a picture of the Tayberry bush:

The other soft fruit is also coming along well. We will soon be picking raspberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants.

We enlarged one of the old beds in the middle section of the garden so that we would have room for some more planting. Here’s the area marked out for digging.

And here it is a month later with the first plants installed. We’ll post an update later in the year when things have filled out a bit.

Here’s the foundation for the new pond. It will have a plastic sheet pond liner on top of a few layers of padding and underlay. I used some old blankets followed by a layer of pond liner underlay to protect the liner from any sharp edges in the bottom of the pond. The blocks along the back will be below the water level and will support some beach rocks that will hide the edge of the liner against the cliff face.

The liner is in and starting to fill with water. This gets it settled down into all of the hollows and corners.

The liner has had an initial trim to tidy things up. You can see the underlay poking out from underneath the liner.

Starting to lay the stones over the liner to hide the edges. I used smaller pieces of liner under the stones to protect the main pond liner from the undersides of the stones.

The pond completed and filled with water. I transferred some pond weed and water from our other pond to get the pond environment started. Piles of stones have been added at each side of the pond to help the frogs, toads and newts discover the pond.

The pond pump is now installed and running but I still need to do a bit of work on organising the flow down the gully behind the pond.

It has hardly rained here since early May and the garden is getting a little stressed. The grass is turning brown and the soft fruit has been smaller than usual. The extra heat has been good for many of the plants though as long as we can keep them watered. Here’s a view across the lower garden with lots of brown grass but the Inula magnifica is in full flower just to the right of the pergola.

The bed below the cliff has filled out nicely this year. We planted a Lilium regale last year and it has produced a good display of large white flowers this year.

We are creating a pond in the lower garden but there was bedrock fairly close to the surface so it’s going to need a small retaining wall to get a bit more water depth.

We planted some redcurrants, blueberries and a tayberry bush a few years ago but the blackbirds always got to the fruit before we could harvest it. The fruit area is a difficult shape and on a slope so we could not use one of the commercially available fruit cages as they are usually intended for a flat, level rectangular area. We ordered a load of 2″ x 2″ treated timber from local company James Smith Fencing and the netting from First Tunnels in Lancashire and set about building a fruit cage. Here’s the start of the construction.

A few days later and we had a fruit cage – just in time before the fruit started to ripen.

This is the first time we’ve seen a whole bunch of ripe redcurrants.

The tayberries have also been very productive.

The raspberries were not as good this year because of the dry conditions. We need to re-organise the raspberry canes for next year to allow more room to get between the plants.

The raspberries grew fairly well in 2016. Here are the new stems tied up to protect them from thrashing around in the winter winds. The pile in front is this year’s fruiting stems that have been cut out. At the left side there is a wind break of willow that we hope will provide some protection to the currant bushed behind.

We had a few frosty days in late November. Not enough to do any serious damage to the garden plants but hopefully enough to kill off some of the bugs ready for next year. We used this picture of a fallen sycamore leaf for our Christmas card.

The crow sculpture is looking a bit chilly on top of the Wining Wall. Maybe mulled wine would be more appropriate?

After a couple of years, some of the plants are getting quite well established. The Inula hookeri is turning into a bit of a thug and is taking over the end of one of the beds. Here are a couple of pictures of the flowers. This is the bud as it opens.

And here’s the flower fully open.

The rockery bed is filling out nicely and we’ll have to start thinking about moving and thinning out a few plants next year.

Down in the lower garden the steep slope that was infested with nettles and brambles has been dug over and contained between some dry stone walls. The upper wall is still being worked on but we have finally been able to plant out a few plants that have been sitting around in pots since we brought them down from Aberdeen.

The fruit patch started to produce in July. Here’s a selection of some of the goodies. We had good crops of gooseberries, blackcurrants and raspberries. The freezer will be busy for the rest of the year! Unfortunately we did not do very well with our vegetables this year. It was quite cold back in April when we planted seeds and many failed to germinate. We should have crops of the basics such as potatoes, onions and leeks though.

We also started to develop some more decorative beds in the middle section of the garden. It’s a bit more sheltered down there so we hope to be able to raise some plants that would not survive up at the top, windswept area of the garden. Here’s the first bed that we have dug out. The sycamore stumps that were in this area have mostly rotted away now so we should be able to get on with some planting soon. This area is heavily infested with persistent weeds such as couch grass, nettles and ground elder so it will require a lot of weeding until we have got them under control.