The month opened with the Easter long weekend. We always planned to make this a productive few days for the garden, and in fact had a list of jobs to focus on, with the two main ones being more painting of the garden office wall, and the relocation of the compost bin. This was placed where it was when we first moved in as it seemed practical, but we fairly soon realised that in fact it took up more space than needed there and used a valuable chunk of the bit of the garden that gets the most sun - so the very area that I want for tomatoes and peppers! Three sacks of immediately useable compost were dug out of the bottom before we got to the stuff that would be moved across and put back in - those sacks will be used to fill our tomato pots for this year. The bin is now in a less intrusive location as well as being slightly nearer to the house - it will work little slower because of getting slightly less sun, but that isn’t likely to be an issue for us.
Trust me, the size of the rhubarb in the top photo is NOTHING to how it looked by mid-month, and indeed by that stage we had already harvested a full kilo of the stuff! We're concentrating on trying to take quite a bit out on the side where it's desperately trying to smother the redcurrant bush in the hope of at least slightly weakening the growth on that side. We've also started coming up with ideas of uses for it, as there is only so much gently stewed fruit one can eat - looking at the progress of the strawberry plants though it does seem that some rhubarb & strawberry jam might be one option.
The mini greenhouse is now back in use too - it’s been housing seedlings for tomatoes, courgettes, sweetcorn, cucumbers and various other things. We've had to build the second mini greenhouse we had for this year - we bought two at a bargain price when the local Wilko store closed, and the first did two good years before the cover split on removal last autumn. the staging from it is still going strong though and starting to prove extremely useful as things no longer need protection from the elements while still benefiting from being raised off the floor. One of the issues through this month has been that we’ve still been getting fairly regular frosts - so the balance has needed to be struck between getting seedlings started and keeping them as sheltered as possible.
Meanwhile in the front garden things are filling out quite beautifully and we’re really beginning to get the look we’re after - we’ve added some more bulbs too which should give some added colour in the late summer and autumn. We’ve added various new plants over the last few weeks - mostly “hospital ward” rescues from the clearance sections in various places (that’s where most of our plants come from!), plus our home grown sunflowers and sweet peas have been added into the mix. In the front right of the photo above is the rather lovely “Sweet Tea” Heuchera which spent the whole of last year after we put it in there looking deeply sulky, and we honestly thought the winter would finish it off. Instead it seems that the colder temperatures made it buck its ideas up!
Until next month then!
Robyn
