Blame it on the couch grass!

Whilst out in the garden this evening, I decided to start digging part of the ground where the lawn used to be – in readiness for the tomatoes to go in sometime next month. In the process, I noticed couch grass roots, which I duly extracted from the soil. So far so good.

Then I noticed some bigger roots. Mmm, this looked as though it could have been a monster of a couch grass to my naive gardening mind and so I pulled.  And I pulled. And I pulled.

When the blackberry bush started to sway and it couldn’t have been because of the wind – there was none – I realised my mistake. These roots belonged to the blackberry bush.

Fingers crossed this little pile of couch grass roots and something much less menacing will not lead to the demise of the blackberry bush. I already made a mistake in pruning it too late and not necessarily sufficiently, earlier in the year, so it is going to need lots of tender loving care from now on, methinks.

Oh well, I have also carried out some more productive work this evening. This includes sowing purple sprouting broccoli in between the broad beans and cauliflower in between the turnips. My thinking is that these will not need the space until the earlier sown vegetables are out of the ground. Another case of fingers crossed but all being well not a damaging adventure!

A better view

In spite of the continued April showers – yes, it is May – and the cool temperatures, after an impromptu afternoon snooze I galvanised myself into action. Here is the overall result, seen from the patio:

And again from the other end of the garden:

I’ve kept some of the flowering broccoli, in case they attract useful insects. I haven’t seen any of late but perhaps the birds have been eating them all. It has certainly been a pleasure to watch the robins as they feed.

Anyway, in the foreground of the first photo you will see that I have now acquired a second compost bin, courtesy of a good friend who felt she no longer had room for it herself. This is to be the finishing off bin and is decidedly empty at the moment…. As I had been turning over the original heap, I had been mixing up old and new compost, so it was quite difficult to separate them after that.

In any case, I am exceedingly pleased to have the bins both out of the way of my immediate eye line – the brown one had been right in front of where I usually sit for a few weeks. Now, I can sit and contemplate my next move more easily again.

Next moves this afternoon included spying dandelion flowers, which were swiftly removed. I reckon I still have at least twenty plants in the garden but this is a fraction of the number 18 months ago, before I started to do anything about them.

I also found a place to put the pots of plants one of my colleagues gave me the other day.

These contain from left to right: Lady’s Mantle, Lungwort and mint. I think that they might all have to stay in pots due to their tendency to take over, I understand. But I will make the necessary decisions on that one when I know where they might go!

Paving stones rehomed!

Another heavy task has just been completed. Some paving stones I lifted from my garden path have now been placed between the rhubarb and the hawthorn bush at the back of the garden and my general household waste bin (black in the photo below) as well as the garden waste bin (brown one) are standing in their new and less obtrusive position.

Previously, the municipal bins filled up pretty much the whole of my path, which effectively meant we had to walk on the garden to get to the back gate. They were also difficult to pull out of the garden because the paving stones underneath were not joined, but rather spaced out with gravel (and weeds!) inbetween.

So, the next question is whether I try to change the direction in which the back gate opens or simply remove it completely. I guess that will depend on whether it disintegrates in the process of unscrewing it

In any case, the gate must be changed, otherwise getting the bins out onto the street will mean manoeuvring them over the rhubarb and anything else which gets in their way!

The value of patience

It’s seventeen degrees out there and sunny, so I’ve been doing a bit of spontaneous gardening. The weeds have been rampant over the winter but many handfuls have now gone in the municipal green waste bin. However, while this job was in itself quite satisfying, nothing could beat seeing how much the rhubarb has come on – and so quickly!

I bought the rhubarb in the spring of 2010 when it was a small crown. As recommended, I took no stalks from it that year and only a few the year after. Then in the autumn of 2011, I moved the crown from a pot to its current position near the apple tree at the back of the garden. I wasn’t sure how much that would affect production but the rhubarb did seem to be okay. The stalks were really quite small, though, and we did not get any substantial dishes from it!

I was therefore totally amazed this afternoon to see the following:

Yes, we can have stuff that looks like it could have been bought….. I am finding it difficult to get my head round the fact that the results of growing your own food can be on a par with anything professionally cultivated. But there you go

Although most of the weeds have now gone, I do like the yellow dandelions, especially here, as a contrast to the purple primroses. The flowers will have to go before they turn into clocks but I will let them be for tonight.

Up with the path!

At last, the path at the back of the garden is coming up!

I had intended to take a before as well as an after shot but didn’t remember to get my camera out until I had lifted nearly all the paving stones. So, here is what the path looked like at this point:

Lifting the paving stones was definitely a job in itself. The ones nearest the gate were okay as they probably hadn’t been trodden down as much as the ones nearest the front. Besides, they weren’t overgrown with grass.

In any case, with the help of my daughter, and a couple of spades, we got them all up. And then we started on the gravel round the stones. This proved to be a much more back-breaking job – lots of dirt under the fingernails, too.

In all, we must have cleared the path of about 50 litres of gravel. Now, that is in bags, waiting for a buyer on Ebay to take them away. I have no idea, of course, if this idea will become a reality but even for £1 it will be a bonus for me.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of work to do. After about two hours’ work, the path doesn’t actually look substantially different from the way it was in the first photo – at least not to my eyes!

We have removed the bulk of the gravel. Now it is on with the messier job of picking out the remainder from the soil, last autumn’s fallen leaves and the various weeds that have grown through the membrane that was under it all.

Hopefully, it won’t take me long to find the motivation to get on with this stage of the job. If the worst comes to the worst, though, I can always lift the membrane and simply put the whole lot in the bin. Whatever, I really don’t think I will be selling the membrane on Ebay

Notwithstsnding, I would like to complete this stage of my garden overhaul as soon as possible, so that I can get on with more exciting things like choosing the flowers for my intended fruit and flower garden, which will extend into the area where the path used to be. I think this is going to take a bit of research, including picking the brains of knowledgeable friends and relatives, as I know next to nothing about what kind of plants to go for.

Anyway, I have promised my daughter we will do an internet search this evening. She is even keener than me to have flowers – at six years old though, I wonder how far it isn’t just so she can pick them?

SOS....Save our Seeds.

Reblogged from fromacountrycottage:

• 

Last night as I was perusing through Facebook, as one does, I came across a post on pending EU legislation that would make it illegal for seed to be sold that was'nt on an approved list. It would also be illegal to grow or swap seeds not on the list. Not always believing what I read on Facebook I did a bit of frantic follow up research and sadly I have to report that it's true.

Read more… 210 more words

This blog post is too important to ignore!

Spinach – a belated success story!

This evening, in the hope that there would be a few spinach leaves for a salad tomorrow, I went out to pick what I expected to be the straggly remnants of the spinach which had been overwintering.

In the previous two years that I had tried this vegetable, it had come to nothing much and I had concluded that my soil or my technique or both were somewhat lacking. It therefore came as quite a surprise when I lifted the cloche and found the leaves pictured above.

There are in fact plenty more where these leaves came from. So, I hope to be able to enjoy quite a few spinach salads, as well as other dishes, before I decide to clear the ground for my flowers. And here was me starting to doubt that I had even the tiniest glimmer of green fingers!

Now, I am hoping that the lettuce I have just sown will also be successful. The corn salad it has replaced was largely unrewarding but this could have been because it was sown too late – if August counts as such? In any case, last year’s lettuce was equally unrewarding. I think that was because the grow bag it was in was not exposed to enough (sun)light, though. In contrast, the new location will get good light for upwards of 15 hours per days over the next few months.

Unfortunately, my sortie into the garden this evening was once again curtailed due to failing daylight but ideally I would like to sow turnips tomorrow. Again, I am hoping that planting them earlier in the season to grow over the summer will result in a much more pleasing crop.