The Queen of Procrastination!

image from Clipart Library

Prior to Christine and John coming up to visit we'd been very busy indoors, carrying out a mahoosive tidying up/cleaning operation.  After they had gone home, though, we really had no more excuses for putting off making a start on the even more mahoosive tidying up of the garden!   

Earlier in the year, all the kitchen garden beds looked pretty much like this 😳  I have absolutely no idea what the majority of this weed wildflower is, but what I do know is that I'm probably destined to be pulling the bloody stuff out for years to come ~ the slightest touch has it throwing out its seeds like popcorn popping in a microwave!  It's obviously the premature ejaculator of the plant world 😏 

I got it all pulled out but dread to think how many of the sodding seeds I've now set in the process, ready to torment me again in a few weeks!  Half of this bed is planted with asparagus, which I'm rather disappointed with to be honest.  I was rather hoping that I would be harvesting it by now but it really isn't growing well at all.  I've decided to see how it does next year and make a decision on whether or not to keep it.  The lone strawberry plant was a runner a couple of years ago that planted itself, so I decided to reward it's tenacity by planting it properly 😄

I did manage to get this bed cleared and potatoes planted before we went down south for our usual visit back in March.  Hopefully I'm not tempting fate, but potatoes seem to grow well in my raised beds.

These are Charlotte potatoes which had been growing in large pots as I had three more seed potatoes than spaces in the bed ~ after all waste not, want not, eh 😉 I've harvested them already because I wanted to make space for two of the four large bags of stone chippings that are due to be delivered today.  I have dug up a few from the raised bed itself now, too.

This bed is rather disappointing to say the least.  The plants on the left are dwarf French beans and on the right is celery.  I've also sown some carrot seeds.  The beans and celery were plug plants from Marshalls, and arrived in pretty poor condition to be perfectly honest.  Next year I may well pull up my big girl panties and try growing plants myself from seed.

And this, my lovelies, is the strawberry bed *sigh*  It looked great, all big green leaves with tantalising glimpses of beautiful red fruits nestled amongst them.  Alas, the reality was somewhat different!  Many of those lovely strawberry fruits were seriously mouldy and unusable.  The plants have produced a very good crop but I believe all the leaf growth has kept too much moisture and not enough air circulation around them.  It's a lesson that next year I will endeavour to heed: once the fruits start to appear, cut back the big leaves to let the air circulate and keep the dampness down.  

I did manage to harvest a small amount of very tasty fruits, so at least the entire crop wasn't lost.  I'm going to move the strawberries to a new bed this year, and plant them in a slightly different way which I'm hoping will aid the air circulation/dampness issues.  More of that in a later post 😉