Friday 24 April 2015

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.









1 comment:

  1. The springtime leaves are lovely - all different shades of green, copper, etc. In the summer everything is just green...

    Your conservatory looks exactly like our upstairs/downstairs/guest room/smallest greenhouse (nothing planted yet - everything in pots and trays).

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