My cottage garden experiment

A few months ago I started planting seeds with a view to trying out a mini cottage garden.  I've never planted flowers from seed before ... veggies yes but not flowers.  I didn't share this with you all at the time as I was a little worried that it wouldn't work, however, I'm pleased to say it has and next year I plan on having a much bigger cottage garden :o)

I started out with this rather sorry looking patch in April.  I dug it all up at the same time I did the veggie patch and kept it covered whilst pampering my seedlings indoors.

A few weeks later ... May 29th to be exact, I planted out all my seedlings and it began to take shape.

Then the sun shone, followed by lots of rain and it turned into this ...

It's mainly made up of cosmos ...

verbena

cornflowers

and a few sunflowers at the back (the only ones that survived my gargantuan slugs and snails!!)

It's all edged with lavendar but that didn't come out so great in the pics.  It's amazing what a difference a bit of sunshine and rain does.  Unfortunatley there are quite a lot of weeds too but that's the joy of a cottage garden ... there not so noticeable :o)  Next year I plan to fill a whole area with these as they were super easy to grow from seed and so much cheaper than buying plants in the garden center.  Not only that they are great for cutting too.

It's a bank holiday here in Ireland so I'm taking a few days off to catch up with friends.  Have a great weekend everyone and thanks for all the great comments about the hen keeping :o)