The lavender hedge is at it's peak now and the bees are busy collecting nectar from it. The hedge is getting on a bit and I have started to take cuttings to replace it but it thrived on a hard prune in the spring. Nearby the scabious that I put in last year are coming into flower too.

The front garden has a lot of shrubs which do a grand job of dampening the noise from the road. The shrubs have got a bit overgrown and I am starting to cut back some of the biggest thugs - one bin-full at a time! But at the moment they are glorious in their abundance and I could stand at look at the symphony of green for hours.
The strawberries have been fantastic this year but are coming to an end now and the courgettes are just beginning to crop regularly. That's the good news! The bad news is that most of the veggies have been decimated by pigeons. The tops have been removed from bean seedlings, beetroot leaves have been pecked until nothing remains except upright purple leaf veins and they have even pecked off the carrot tops. The only thing they don't seem to like are turnips. So I have had to start again with the beans and beetroot. They are all at their most vulnerable stage at the moment and so I have been rigging up what protection and bird scaring devises that I can - hence the bottle tops hanging from canes etc. It looks like our beans will be late this year.