Gardening Fun

Well when I say fun I do mean it in the loosest possible way.

I have a great garden. It has grass and trees and a tall hedge that holds the neighbours back and the sun gets there (sometimes). I have planned for ages to grow vegetables but every year things seem to happen all at once I lose the window of opportunity. A few years ago I turned a bookcase into a raised bed and that was great but a combination of squirrels, birds and my laziness meant that only the potatoes did well.

This is what it looks like. Along one side of the garden is a tall privet hedge that has a line of old concrete slabs to give you a place to stand to cut the hedge and then next to that is a much over grown, grassed over bed with astonishingly old roses in but little else. The grass grows freely or should I say, it did.

As the weather was so lovely this weekend I decided to take the garden by the scruff of it's neck and give it a little shake. Starting closet to the house and next to the slabs, I measured out a 1 metre by 1 metre square and started to mattock off the turf and weeds. Then I dug over the soil with a fork, breaking up the bit lumps and picking out as many roots as I could. Gone went the rose. Then I extended the bed up by another metre and then another and another and by the end of the weekend I had a vegetable bed 1 metre wide by 5 metre.

I ended the weekend having cut back a rather rampant honeysuckle, tidying the raised bed, clearing the rubbish and throwing things away that were too badly broken to be re-used. The compost heap has grown quite significantly and is now covered with a manky tarpaulin to help give it some heat. Along the tree side of the garden I dug out some of the ferns and I 'found' my very sad and neglected rhubarb plant.

Now I just have to wait for the soil to warm up and I shall start my planting.