Gorgeous weather today and finally the chance to do some gardening, so pruning the lavender (which umm should have been done last year), lots of weeding (but still lots more to do), clearing out last winter’s vegetable garden and planting some new plants.
Last winter’s vegetable garden was not the greatest of successes, it was the first time I had attempted to grow veg over winter and I don’t think it was helped by this winter being particularly cold and although I didn’t get any frost damage (I’m lucky in that my patio is very sheltered), they also didn’t grow particularly quickly and then when the weather started getting warmer again, bang, they bolted! The big success was winter purslane, a salad crop and apparently a particularly nutritious one at that, very easy to grow and very cut and come again. I also liked and had some success with the green and red frills mustard, another salad crop. The lollo rosso just didn’t grow and then died. The lambs lettuce just didn’t grow and then in a blink of an eye bolted. The Giant Red Mustard was a bit too much of a tough salad leaf for me. The Texel Greens looks unappetising. A big problem with the salads was that when I wanted to go out and cut some i.e. as I was preparing my evening meal, it was of course dark and trying to root round for some leaves in the dark and cold was not particularly making me want to have salad for tea!
The beetroot and the spring onions got got by pigeons, which is a big problem on my patio. When emptying my beetroot container I found one surviving beetroot . . .
. . . yes laugh.
So everything got cleared out today, some of the old soil got mixed with some compost in one of our old empty dustbins (holes in bottom drilled by Mr. Lacer last weekend) and I planted some potatoes, Maris Peer, second earlys as recommended by Gardener’s World, apparently the potato flowers smell nice on these ones. Then Boy Lacer distracted me by getting upset that his trousers were wet (he’d been playing with the watering cans, it was inevitable) and so whilst I was changing him Girl Lacer went ahead and planted a shrub and a perennial (unsupervised) that we’d brought in Sainburys last week, she actually didn’t do a too bad job, she did them in pots though (the thought of planting something actually in the garden is an alien concept for her) and the soil is a little low but still, Girl Lacer proto gorilla gardener in the making.
Anyway got lots of gardening coming up, still got all that weeding and my frighteningly large Rocket Gardens (yes in plural this year) will be arriving hopefully by the end of this month. We’ve also hopefully got some seeds coming from the BBC’s DIG IN campaign (I think the send in offer for the seeds in closed now but hopefully we got our name down before they ran out of seeds). I also want to try spring onions again, those pigeons will not defeat me (this will be spring onion attempt four, each previous attempt has been got by pigeons).
