Spring Gardening

Since the fence fell down in the middle of the winter we have not done much to the garden but this week we have started clearing up the garden and sorting it out for spring. Since the weather has started getting better the plants have suddenly started growing again we are hoping to take advantage of this and see if we can get some veg this summer.

We started by clearing out all the old fence panels that were still in the garden, so that we didn’t have to mess up the back of Nikki’s car making multiple trips to the dump we bought a Hippo Bag to use in place of a skip. This is the second time we have used one of these as before when we cleared up the back of the garden we didn’t have a car and so taking things to the skip was not even an option.

After removing the build up we mowed the lawn, I always forget how much of a difference this makes to our garden as the back lawn is at about eye level when you are sitting in the kitchen!

After that we turned our attention to the beds, removing the weeds from the herb bed and trying to stake the rosemary upright a bit more… Nikki concentrated on removing weeds and rocks and trees from the main bed we want to use for planting and I re-potted a lot of last years plants.

Nikki’s “look what I just removed” victory photo..

This whole bed needs over turning and even more stones removing!

Last year we grew quite a lot of herbs and this year the ones that survived winter in pots needed separating out, especially the mint which I now have 10 pots of!

lots of mint!

During a ‘quick’ trip to B and Q we found a number of reduced plants which we decided to rescue and few non reduced ones. We now have a number of plant pots full of veg plants.

Part of our Small plant haul!

A Pepper plant from IKEA sharing a pot with an Aubergine, some Broad Beans and a Beefsteak Tomato

The smaller veg pot containing a Beefsteak and a Plum Tomato, Apache Chilli, some Basil plants and hopefully some Marigold flowers (from seed)

We also ventured into new territory this year and bought some onion seedlings which came as a 6 pack, 2 of each of 3 varieties Spring Onion, White Onion and Red Onion. We separated out the seedlings to plant the traditional onions separately and the spring onions in small groups. These produced many more seedlings than we thought it would and we have one end of a grow bag, a large pot and a window box full of onions!

Onions… Lots of Onions, and a Courgette…

We have also strayed into potato territory purchasing a bag of seed potatoes. We have currently potted up 3 large pots with 4 in each pot and still have half a bag of seed potatoes left!