Many of English Lakes hotel guests take advantage of the summer Festivals in Cumbria each year. We take a look back at some of the highlights of last year’s Garden Festival in the run up to another spectacular event in 2016. (more…)
On a glorious day out in the Lake District there can be no better pastime than wandering through some of the finest examples of garden design in the country. With landscape architects the calibre of Thomas Mawson, Guillaume Beaumont and even William Wordsworth himself, you will find yourself spoilt for choice. Here are five that we think top the list. (more…)
Laura Ticehurst, Receptionist at The Wild Boar found herself donning wellies and taking to the Inn's new and freshly dug vegetable patch earlier this year. A novice gardener, Laura shares her successes, failures and one or two tips for getting rid of those pesky slugs ...
At the beginning of spring 2013 I knew nothing about gardening and had no particular desire to know anything about it either……..that was until it was suggested that as a Green Champion it would be great if I could become involved and “help out” with the vegetable patch at The Wild Boar. Little did I know that the word “help” would be interpreted as “be solely responsible for”. So being thrown head first into the world of home grown vegetables has made for an interesting year with many successes and one or two failures. I've learnt what to do and what not to do and have also created and refined my own gardening tips!
At the start of spring I eagerly planted peas, carrots, beetroot, different varieties of lettuce and rocket, courgettes, French beans, shallots, red onions, spring onions and radishes as well as sweet potatoes and marrows. The radishes were first to grow and after I had completed the back breaking work of thinning them out once they had grown into seedlings; they soon grew to be big juicy tasty accompaniments to the salads chef put on the specials menu. This success though was met by a failure with the beetroot crop. After I had thinned the beetroot out they didn't take too kindly to the extremely hot weather we had over the summer and therefore didn't grow much bigger than the size of a marble. The rocket was growing by the bucketful and we had so much that chef dreaded my daily visits to the kitchen with the days harvest so the staff ended up taking some of it home too!