Feb 25th, 2014

Author: marionmccune

Gardening

After an inauspicious start to yesterday – it got out quite nice in the afternoon. Walking around the garden, various flowers are just on the point of bursting out of their buds – particularly narcissi, of which we have hundreds.  But there are also primroses unfurling on the bank by the polytunnel where I can see from the leaves that later on in the year we are going to have wild violets.

So spring is starting to be here and it is time to start gardening in earnest.  Over the last few weeks I have got the polytunnel more or less ready, with several raised beds filled with a mixture of the new topsoil and homemade compost.

 

I’ve planted broccoli, cauliflowers, onions, potatoes, leeks, sprouts and garlic in the tunnel, and in the greenhouse I have tomatoes, peppers and chillies growing in a heated propagator (don’t tell the cats but there may be some catnip hiding in there as well).

So now I need to do the hard work and get an out door vegetable patch dug because there is no way that I can grow anything like enough of our staples indoors.  So I measured out the area I am going to prepare and pegged it out with string.  It is 9 yards long by 4.5 wide and is going to be divided into four smaller patches for the four different rotations of crop.  I was thinking about having paths between the plots done in stone paving – but after reading how complicated it sounds to lay it – I am going to go for bark paths with tree trunk ‘stepping stones’ for the time being.  Below was progress by end of day two – I have done most of the first section…

Looking at the picture I can see that if the gardening doesn’t work out, it will give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘where the bodies are buried’.

So work permitting, the plan is to get all four sections done by half way through March, by which time the soil should have warmed up enough to transplant some of the seedlings out of the tunnel.