First leaves

The beech leaves have started unfurling

It's been a week of firsts. The first of the beech leaves are out and everything is greening up nicely. We had the first of our rhubarb since it has obviously taken to its new site. And then I saw the first of these in veg garden:

Dunluce early potatoes: a welcome sight

First Jerusalem artichokes

And globe artichokes

Jim is in the process of mowing the bottom paddock for the first time this year. It's pretty hard-going, with all the tough winter growth, and we're having to get up early to mow and gather while the dew is still on the grass. We haven't had rain for about 10 days and everything is bone dry. I've had to water the heathers and the outdoor seedlings every day, but that's all going to change this afternoon. The clippings make excellent mulch and I've mulched everywhere I can think of: the heathers, all the hedges, rose beds, fruit trees...

Heathers mulched with the lush grass from the bottom paddock

Tidied-up pond with mulch around the astilbes

And it looks like there's going to more mulch from the top paddock shortly! That will probably be for the potatoes.

The conservatory is getting fuller by the day. These cucumbers and squashes really grow fast once they've germinated. I'm now waiting for the brassicas to get large enough to plant out. Then all the tomatoes are going to migrate to the greenhouse from the conservatory and give up their window seats to the cucumbers, peppers and aubergines. It's a vegetable merry-go-round.

Full conservatory

In another bout of back-breaking labour, we've dismantled the useless fence around the hazelnut grove. Jim's seafaring knowledge came to the rescue once more as he came up with a clever system of rolling hitches to make a pole extractor. (Unfortunately it still involved a lot of heaving of poles.)

Fence be gone

I even had time to do major TLC on the front garden, which had been neglected so far. An afternoon's weeding and my first weeding blister of the year later, it looked like this:

Weeded front garden

And I even got rewarded for my efforts as Jim spotted this in the freshly turned soil:

1917 penny - worth £2 on eBay these days

Makes a nice change from finding asbestos roof fragments.

Busy bees

What a busy month April is in the garden! When we're not sowing, potting up, watering, weeding (yes, it's necessary again) or digging, we've been harvesting gorse blossoms for our first spring wine.

6 litres of gorse blossom

It was quite a prickly job, getting enough gorse flowers, but the coconut scent is quite amazing. It seems to be a good year for gorse around here.

Mighty fine gorse

Jim chilled the wort in our burn, inside an old tyre, and the temperature quickly went down to yeast adding temp. This wine is one that needs to mature for 9 months, after 2-3 months of brewing, so it will be ready for next spring. This is not as much delayed gratification as my asparagus project, which will kick off next week: five years to harvest!

In the conservatory, you can now start to differentiate the different seedlings:

Aubergines (Bonica)

Chilli pepper (Hungarian Black)

Yellow courgette (Jemmer)

All the brassicas have been moved into the greenhouse, along with the tomatillos and the second batch of tatsoi and some herbs.

All brassica (kale, romanesco, cauliflower, sprouts, cabbage)

The garden superintendent checks on the greenhouse

And despite my being an edibles gardener, flowers are starting to creep into the garden:

Star of Bethlehem

Fabulous daffs

Jim single-handedly dug up and sowed a 10-metre strip of wild flower meadow this week. This came in a handy Mini Meadow seed pack. Can't wait for them to pop up.

Wild flower meadow strip to be

We had replanted an old clematis next to the electricity pole in our garden this winter. It looked pretty dead, but it appears to have taken. Go, go, go!

Electricity pole beautification programme

Overwintering veg is definitely worthwhile around here. Both onions and broad beans are way ahead of early sowings. The onion variety that did best is Rossato di Milano.

Overwintering onions (front) versus set onions (background)

Aguadulce broad beans in flower already!

I'm netting off all my peas and salads to ward off sneaky blackbird attacks. Here's pea Fort Knox:

Netted off Kelvedon Wonders

We're still eating spring cabbage almost every day, but some of them are starting to flower in quite impressive ways:

Flowering spring cabbage

The rhubarb from our neighbour appears to have taken well:

Happy rhubarb

The fruit tress are starting to blossom:

Apple blossom 

Pear

Now we just need to wait for the beech leaves to unfurl. And then it will be time for the second of the spring wines: hawthorn blossom.

29 varieties of heather

Heather slope

It's done. A total of 282 heather plants are in after a week of back-breaking labour (and crawling into bed by 21.30). After coming across a broken toilet seat, a flush handle and a smashed toilet bowl, we concluded that the rubble was from an old extension housing the toilet. Luckily our farmer neighbour is about to crush a whole lot of rubble to use as road in-fill so we could add our rubble (minus the asbestos) to the pile.

View with new stone 'wall'

We had to use a lot of stone to build up the slope again. Fortunately, it was all provided by the ground around the garden. We might actually use up all of our stones!

But before any planting took place, we had to exclude the chickens. While they are good pest and weed control, they also have the unfortunate habit of scratching the hell out of the soil and destroying any young plants in the process. It's quite a challenge to do gardening with hens around and since we have several plans for the top paddock this year (wild flower meadow strip, tea herb garden), we had to contain the poor chucks in a quarter of an acre.

Hens, keep out

This is good news for those of our visitors afear'd of cockerel attack. Russell is now safely contained and can be easily avoided.

The heathers come in all shapes and forms, some flowering in winter and spring, others in summer and still others in autumn. For the record the varieties are: Erica carnea (Winter Sun, Ann Sparkes), Erica x darleyensis (Ghost Hills, Mary Helen, Jack H Brummage, J W Porter, Furzey, Ada S Collings) Erica erigena (W T Rackliff), Daboeica cantabrica (Alba Globosa, William Buchanan Gold), Erica x stuartii (Irish Lemon), Erica cinerea (Autropurpurea, White Dale, Mrs E A Mitchell, Eden Valley, Pentreath), Erica tetralix (Pink Star), Erica vagans (Valerie Proudley), Calluna vulgaris (County Wicklow, Golden Carpet, Guinea Gold, Salmon Leap, Glenfiddich, Silver Knight, White Lawn, Allegro, Caerketton White, Alex Warwick - a cultivar from St Kilda originally).

For those who think heather is plain, I include a couple of close-ups:

Spring-flowering heather

Erica vagans Valerie Proudley

I especially like the varieties with golden foliage.

It will take a couple of years for the plants to fill in and form a carpet and in the meantime we'll have a struggle to keep the ground elder out. We'll mulch around the plants when the grass gets cut next time, to help with that and to keep the moisture in.

Other than that, I've started on the spring weeding in the upper part of the garden:

The sweetpeas are out

Herb pond with thyme, oregano, Vietnamese coriander, parsley, coriander and nasturtiums

Strawberry pond ready for action

In the conservatory space is at a premium. I need to catch up with potting and sowing. The tomatoes and brassica desperately need to be potted up, a job for this afternoon. I managed to sow the squashes yesterday, despite the fatigue from the rock and rubble lifting.

Tomatoes and cucumbers

In the kitchen we're eating spring cabbage almost every day. I'm turning into quite a big fan of the stuff. My favourite way of preparing it at the moment: blanch and stir-fry in sesame oil, as part of egg-fried rice. No doubt, my spring cabbage recipe list will expand exponentially as it will be awhile before anything else but salad leaves is ready. Our maincrop potatoes are still storing well and it looks like we might just make it on the old ones until the first earlies become available.

OK, time to commune with the tomatoes!

Roots and rubble

The rubble garden

It was supposed to be so easy. We had the weed-infested rock garden under black plastic for almost a year. All we needed to do was lift the plastic, give it a quick dig over and remove the weed roots and then plant the 270 heather plants that were delivered last week.

Some of the Scottish heather selection

Alas, it was not to be. The 'rock garden' turned out to be a rubble garden, containing the remains of an old extension, complete with asbestos roof panels, and an inconveniently located drain pipe. In among the rubble are thousands of ground elder roots, the most I've ever seen and they don't seem to be dead after their year under plastic, either.

More rubble with every dig

Only the chickens are happy - what a fantastic new foraging area. Just full of snacks.

Hard-working hens

So the three-day job looks like it will be a two-week job. Major remodelling of the rock garden slope will have to be done, with a stone wall of sorts at the top. A good use for all the nice stones that we've found around the garden, but hard work to carry them all up. Who needs a gym when you've got a garden.

Still to be dug, what surprises will we find?

The heathers at least are looking fantastic and as soon as we unpacked them the bumblebees moved in. It's a huge variety, flowering at different times of the year, with different colours of flower and leaves: white, golden, pink, purple. Should look wonderful when they're all in place and be super hardy, which they need to be in that exposed spot. We just need to keep the hens out so that the heathers can establish themselves and not be scratched to death.

Meanwhile, the conservatory is filling up rapidly:

The sowing table is full

New this year: tomatillos

Plenty o peppers

Tomatillos, tomatoes and lemon verbena

Outside in the veg garden, I have the peas and pak choi seedlings under mini tunnels. The tunnels did suffer a bit in the recent spate of gales. I had to weigh the plastic down with paving slabs in the end, but I don't foresee it surviving very long. Still, the hoops will be very useful for netting over the brassicas and peas. 

I also sowed salad crops and carrots under the cloches and then, after discovering that parsnip seeds are only good for a year (and the first sowing not showing any signs of life), I went all out and sowed all of my remaining parsnip seeds in three rows. So it's either going to be feast or famine. If it's a feast, then we'll make lots of parsnip wine.

Some comfrey cuttings have been potted up as well. Since we have decimated our nettle stocks, comfrey will be our future source of fertiliser.

Hopefully the last of the spring gales

I've sown so much that I've run out of little pots. But there will be 270 more when the heathers get planted. The squash sowing might have to wait until then.

In the rest of the garden, we planted a blackberry 'Triple Crown' and two goji berries this week and a couple of goat willows to improve the drainage. I keep saying to Jim that this will be the last of the planting, honest.