Gardening 2013

I don't seem to have posted about gardening yet this year. I kept forgetting to take a garden at the beginning of the month photo, so I totally lost impetus with it. Then Spring took so long arriving, for ages there wasn't much to photograph!

Since then I've made quite a bit of progress though, even if a lot of plants are still about a month behind in growing terms, and the tulips are only just dying down.

The strawberries I propagated last year have finally flowered and are growing fruit, so I've now covered them in little cages to stop the birds eating all the fruit this year(!). I'm allergic to strawberries, but the OH didn't get to eat one last year!

This is my raised bed, with square metre gardening attempt one on the go. This contains garlic, shallots, broad beans (2 sowings), purple sprouting broccoli, salad leaves (4 varieties, 2 sowings), plus marigolds and nasturtiums to attract pollinating insects and hopefully distract the aphids. Everything but the broccoli I've grown from seed - the broccoli plants were reduced to 20p at Homebase!

The broad beans are a dwarf variety but it's been so windy they kept flopping over on top of other things so I ended up staking them anyway.

I'm rather pleased with how that square has gone. This is the square a month ago. The square to the left of it is a little further behind and has later sowings of salad leaves, radishes, broad beans, plus beetroot and cauliflower in it.

 I've also planted up containers of herbs to have near the kitchen door: thyme, rosemary, lavender, mint (2 varieties), bergamot, chives and parsley. There are also four tomato plants here as well, but they've only just flowered. And we've created a sitting-out area on the patio, with a new little table, plus some fuchsias I grew from cuttings taken last year, a rose that has moved house with me from Newark and a heuchera that just refuses to grow planted in the border.

All of that gardening is new this year, and I'm glad to finally get vegetables more into production than before. Both of our apple trees are also covered in fruit this year, so we should hopefully get a crop (they were planted 2.5 years ago, but we removed all the fruit in the first year to let the roots develop and the small harvest was eaten by something last year!).

Knitting and holiday updates to follow!