Coming to Life

As promised this weekend, a gardening post. One of the main things I noticed on returning from our holiday in Crete, was that the garden had suddenly started coming to life.  It looked much greener than I  remembered it, with bluebells flowering and  blossoms on all of my fruiting plants and trees.

I had virtually resigned myself to finding that the foxes had marrauded through the raised beds and disturbed everything that I'd sown, but thankfully, although they had dug down in places, the majority of the beds were still intact, with lots of lettuce seedlings and petit pois plants still growing.  It was a relief.

More good news was that many of the seeds I'd sown before we went away had now germinated.  There were kale, calendula, courgette, cucumber, kohl rabi, red basil and sunflower seedlings poking through.  None had been eaten by snails, which I also half expected.  There's only really the tomato and sweet pepper seeds still to germinate, but I think I sowed them quite early outside, so they'll probably need a bit more heat.

All I needed to do was straighten up the covers on the raised beds and water everywhere. Simple

This weekend is the first one in which we've been at home in London for a good few weeks and first thing on my list of gardening tasks was to move my little greenhouse to reunite it with the potting bench at the end of the garden. 

OH helped my by making a flat paved surface to stand it on and we carefully carried over and set it up in it's new home.  It fitted in perfectly and it's a bit of a suntrap in this corner so my tomato plants, when they eventually go in, will love it. Here's a picture of it in it's new home.

The next job was to pot on lots of the seedlings which were growing fast, particularly the kale, kohl rabi and marigolds. Here they are in their new individual pots with plenty of room to grow even bigger.

I also moved a few things around on the patio, putting my fruit bushes and rhubarb where the greenhouse used to stand by the back door.  I repotted the gooseberry bush in the middle into this new larger pot to give it more room to grow.  It's doing well.  I now just need to repot the blueberry next to it as it's soil has mossed over and the pot is cracked and crumbling away.  I need to get some ericaceous compost for this job and it's not in this month's budget, so it might have to wait until after it's fruited now.

Here's the new view down the garden from the kitchen table and as you can see it's a lot greener now. (Please note that I had my towels on the line for the first time this year.  I'm not good at hanging my washing out, but I made an exception for the towels, to help them smell fresher.)

The paths around the raised beds still need tidying (OH's job) and he's agreed to make more attractive covers for the raised beds when we can get to the DIY store for some wood.  I can't wait, it will make life so much easier as all the solutions I've tried are still not keeping the foxes out.

We got quite a lot done in a short amount of time this weekend, so I'm very happy.  I'll keep you posted on future progress.