Sidetracked...

image from Magnific.com

In my last garden post, we had come to a bit of a standstill with re-making the wildlife area whilst Adrian was constructing the raised bed(s).  I couldn't really do anything to help him, so I drew a deep breath and veered off to make a start on tackling all the other weedy areas in the front garden 😳 

As you know, we've decided to considerably scale back the kitchen garden and over the coming months all the beds in the front will be dismantled ~ more on that in future posts 😉

One thing we do still want to grow is at least some potatoes, as homegrown ones are just so much tastier than shop-bought ones!  I was very late in planting out my chitted seed potatoes this year, and confess that I did wonder if they would actually grow once I'd got them in the ground.  I'm pleased to report that every single one has sent up a fine head of leaves so hopefully we'll have another good crop of potatoes again later this year 😊  I'm trying a different variety this time: Caledonian Rose.  Since this photo was taken, I have plonked a good layer of soil over the plants ~ as usual, I'm pretty behind with photo-sharing 😏

I'm only growing potatoes this year as we've got such a lot of work to get done in the garden, so the raised beds have come in useful as holding beds for the plants I've kept for re-planting in due course.  This bed had potatoes in it last year and I obviously didn't get all the teeny-tiny spuds removed, hence them sprouting away quite happily!

If the bed had been empty I would probably have left them to grown on, but I had already moved in some of the plants which had been in the beds where the new patio now is.  The potatoes were starting to smother the poor little buggers, so out they had to come I'm afraid. 

I was particularly pleased to see these dahlias coming through, as I thought the winter would probably kill them off.  I had them in pots last year and was just too lazy to store them "properly" over winter, so into the raised bed they went 😄  I suspect the fact that they were planted in a raised bed probably helped with drainage, and thus stopped their tubers getting too wet and rotting away.

This was the view I had through to the Hoy Hills whilst I was working 😍

These plants were what I decided to keep from the old pond area.  Some of the tiger lilies are currently flowering, so this part of the garden smells lovely ~ perhaps that's why next-door's cat seems to like it over here so much 😄

You may recall that this bed had large pots of strawberries in it.  Luckily it was a pretty straightforward task to tidy up the plants, disposing of the handful that had died, and move the pots round to the back garden.  They are in a temporary area at the moment until we work our way round to re-jigging the back garden at some point 😱  This will be the first of the kitchen garden beds to be re-purposed as part of the new pond area ~ all will become clear as the work out there continues, I promise 😏

I couldn't summon up the energy to tackle the garden borders, so compromised by tidying this bed over on the other side of the garden instead.  It looked worse than it actually was, to be fair, and didn't really take too long.  You'll have to take my word for it, though, as I forgot to take a photo when I'd finished 😄

I fairly often come across frogs on this side of the garden.  I didn't notice this one until I almost grabbed hold of it along with the debris I was clearing out!  It sat there with its back to me for quite a few minutes before moving off.  I'm hoping that once we get the new pond area set up we'll find more froggy visitors/residents in the garden 😊