Still chomping at that elephant!

image from Clipart Library

Despite last week's radio silence from yours truly, we were still plugging away at the work to be done in the garden ~ it's never-bloody-ending 😳 

Adrian has made great progress in our new little patio area in the front garden, and as you can see the raised bed on the left has now been extended.  Incredibly it has eaten all of the soil mountain, plus half a dozen bags of not-quite-fully-composted compost that had to be emptied out from our bins when we topped up all the stone chippings earlier in the year.  The soil from the mountain was extremely wet and claggy, which made the job much more difficult and tiring.

As always, I'm behind with photos.  The bed on the right is now completely empty, and Adrian has also since used some of the soil from it to top up the "new" bed.  Now that we can see the potential space we've decided to completely dismantle the bed on the right, to make the seating area larger.  It will be nice to be able to position the garden furniture against the tall walls, making the seating area more sheltered and cosy.

We'll be left with more soil again, of course, but we've already been dipping into it to top-up other parts of the garden, so I don't think it will be hanging around for long!  The leftover wooden boards won't go to waste, either, as Adrian wants to use them to top off the edging of the borders over in the ornamental garden.  

Back in August I told you about the trials and tribulations of this year's strawberry crop.  I mentioned that I was intending to move them to a new location, and plant them in a different way.  This, my lovelies, is the idea I had to hopefully make the bed easier to manage.  The pots are quite large, certainly big enough to set the strawberry supports I got from Marshalls in.   I managed to get half the new bed done but it wasn't as easy as I had hoped it would be, as the soil was pretty wet and heavy 😒  As usual it took far longer than I had anticipated just to get half the bed done but luckily for me Adrian volunteered to tackle the other half, which he finished today, although I haven't taken photos yet.

I've been working round the other kitchen garden beds over the last week or so, keeping the weeds at bay before it becomes too unpleasant to work out there.  As you can see, I made a start on the other half of the new strawberry bed.  I made of a mess of it, to be honest, as I somehow managed to dig too far down in the soil when I was putting in the pots 😳 That's probably why Adrian took pity on me and volunteered to do it 😄

What's that saying?  "One year's seeds, seven years weeds"?  The asparagus bed was developing yet another fine crop of the buggers, but thankfully it didn't take long to pull the blighters out.

Looks a tad odd, I know, but there's method in my madness 😉 I treated myself to a selection of tulips and narcissus from J. Parkers to grow as cut flowers.  I planted them in pond plant baskets to make them easier to remove once they have finished flowering.  I'll then tuck them away, still in the baskets, in a suitable spot in the back garden until I replant them again next autumn.  I may well plant at least some of them into the borders, though, and buy some different varieties to grow for the spring of 2026.  Of course, it sounds good in theory ~ we'll just have to wait and see what it pans out like in practice!

And to finish off, I dug up the last of this year's potato crop this morning.  Whilst they have been very tasty, the potatoes definitely haven't grown as large this year.  Hopefully next year's crop will be better 😊