Friday saw me back in the garden, continuing to make the most of the dry weather. It was lovely and sunny but the wind was bitingly chilly ~ thankfully my gardening gloves have a nice fleecy lining! I was amazed to see a young woman walking her dog, wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt (the lass, not the dog, obviously 😄) ~ meanwhile yours truly was wearing a camisole beneath an old short-sleeved top along with an equally old cardigan and fleece jacket (all of which are saved for gardening and "dirty" jobs), topped off with a scarf and woolly hat 😯
You may recall that I planted some celery last year. The plants didn't do anything, not even putting on much growth, nevertheless the ones that survived have come through the winter. As you may have guessed, I have no idea what I'm doing here ~ I've decided to just let the plants do their own thing and see what happens!
I decided to get all the vegetable beds weeded before things started to get out of hand. There were more weeds in the asparagus bed than the other three, but even so it really didn't take long at all to tidy them up. I'm not convinced, by the way, that the asparagus will grow this year as there is no sign of any shoots whatsoever. If nothing is forthcoming I think I shall probably put it down to experience and use the bed as part of the crop rotation.
This is the old strawberry bed, which I have now planted up with this year's potato crop. I have two varieties: Kestrel and Jazzy. As you know, I like to divide my beds into approximately 12"/30cm squares to try to give some semblance of order 😉 I find this works out very nicely for my potato crops ~ I can just put one seed potato in the middle of each square and then I roughly know where to start harvesting in due course. There were only 10 Kestrel seed potatoes making up the 1kg I bought, so I decided to move a couple of the pots of tulips (that I'm growing for cutting) into two of the corner spaces in the bed. I had too many Jazzy for the 12 allocated squares, so the leftovers have now been planted in large pots. I did that yesterday and the pots are now sitting beside bed number 5, on the Jazzy side of course 😃
Once I'd finished with the raised beds, I turned my attention to the upper patio area. I completely forgot to take any "before" photos, but to be honest you probably wouldn't notice much difference 😄 The tubs had barely any weeds in them, so it was mostly a case of lightly pruning the roses and buddleja and "fluffing up" the soil after being pounded by wet weather over the winter. I also gave the roses a sprinkling of rose feed granules, and the buddleja a scattering of chicken manure pellets.
Everything in the raised bed ~ that Adrian made taller last year ~ has survived both being moved from elsewhere in the garden, and the ravages of the winter weather. Again, there weren't too may weeds to be dealt with although there were a few dandelions that I know I didn't get completely pulled out, so they will be putting in an appearance again very soon no doubt 😒
Look what I found! That, my lovelies, is a piece of the humungous fuchsia that Beverly and Lyndi removed from beside the pond last year! Good job I found it otherwise it would be trying to make a come-back bid 😏
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