This year, there WILL be a garden

If Jerry's brother and sister-in-law can resuscitate their allotment after a flood, I can dig mine out from the weeds and couch grass and get planting!

In the last month or so I have been progressively digging over the beds that have been basically ignored since before we went away for 10 weeks last winter. Let me tell you folks, it has been ugly! One a day has really been all I (and my back) could manage. In fact a couple of them took 2 days.

This picture gives you a good idea about the state of the garden - but multiply that by 14 beds...

And that same patch of garden now (from the reverse angle). All the beds have been dug over, and had a dose of manure. These beds were done about 4 weeks ago, and when I scraped back the mulch yesterday the worms were going mad. When I originally dug over the beds and added the manure there were almost no worms. These beds should be ready to plant out for the main spring/summer planting starting next month.

The beds that I want to plant first I have used purchased compost and mushroom compost, so I can plant almost straight away, but the others will have 4-8 weeks for the worms to work on the manure and other bits of home made compost.

As the new garden season has really only just started here, there isn't much to show apart from some self seeded spinach and mustard leaf, and some rocked that is going to seed for the year. However the garlic is coming along nicely.

The same can not be said for the fruit cage, which looks a mess! However, we have plans to redo this area, remove the beds on either side of the fence, and extend, so motivation is low for serious weeding at this stage.