Tag: garden

And that cherry tree I planted yesterday flowered today.

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First thing today, I was up and out and running the garden shredder for an hour.

These pots are deep, I’ve run out of homemade compost and bags of shop-bought are getting pricey again. So I drop some old pots on the bottom for drainage and taking up some volume, and then half-fill with wood chips. I’m also out of Perlite, so I scatter a couple handfuls of grit in there.

Golden Harvest mange tout, germinated and raised in one of the mini-greenhouses, in these very handy re-useable plug pots.

I like the old fashioned tools. Probably down to having watched Jack Hargreaves’ OUT OF TOWN every weekend as a kid. Handling them is part of the meditative pleasure of garden work for me.

All in, bamboo wigwam inserted, some extra rows of twine for support, netting tied in over the top for plant support and hopefully deterring the squirrels.

We will see if they all immediately die. But I got plenty of air and sun (and three thousand steps) doing all that, and that’s really the goal. Peaceful couple of hours.

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And by garden we mean BOMB SITE

This year has been nothing but high gales and heavy rain.

And millions of seeds blown in by the storms and then watered in by the bloody rain.

A lot of these weeds are garlic mustard, which is a quaint old name for what is basically THE CYANIDE PLANT OV DEATH.

Anyway.

This broken old mini greenhouse has been righted, put and tied down, with string trellis supports suspended inside.

Redcurrant and cherry put in the ground.

Golden berry and cape gooseberry that I overwintered undercover have been planted out, and tomatoes started indoors have been potted up – one is a variety called Blue Pear that I’m interested to see what happens with.

Cleaned and top dressed the blueberries , did the same with some of the raspberries, emptied a compost bin, dug out a ton of weeds (three tons still to do), started refilling the empty compost bin. Got about half of what I wanted to get done, done, but half is better than none.

Weeding is bullshit.

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So I have a chunk missing out of one finger now, but it was worth it. One month ago, I started the raised bed. Today. I repaired the sides – one with a plastic spike and one with duct tape ugh. Raked it over, pulled out a log that had magically risen to the surface (I have a plan for it), added a forty-litre bucket of compost from Bin 1, a few kilos of grit, half a bag of Perlite and around 75 litres of peat free compost, mixed and raked and levelled it. Hammered in the hoops. Made A-frames.

Planted Red Baron onion sets, nasturtium Black Velvet, Scorpius spinach, borage and Gniff carrot. That’s about half the bed. Leaving the other half until end of month, when I can sow beetroot, parsnip, cornflower and whatever else I think I can fit in it. I just covered it in fleece again because we’re about to have another cold night. Should be the last one for a while, so I’ll take the fleece off in the morning.

And then wrestled the netting over. It’s not quite pinned down all around — it needs to relax a bit. So right now it’s just ziptied to the hoops and stretched over the A-frames until it calms down. I doubt it will protect completely against the cats, foxes and squirrels that make this patch such a nightmare, but I can at least make it harder for them. I’m going to spread the top with grit and organic Slug-Fuck-Off end of the coming week.

Now it’s time to wash out the propagator and start some peppers and tomatoes indoors.

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