I realised that as Gill and I will both be travelling a lot in May, that I need to get my seedlings built up and into the ground. So I did a lot of work digging compost into the beds, putting plants and herbs into the ground and generally tidying up. Hard work, but the garden is looking good.


This is the new bed at the side of the greenhouse. I've broken it into lots of little squares and it's acting as a salad and overflow bed.


Believe it or not we're starting to run the water butts low.


I put the runner beans and broad beans into the ground. This little bed (new last year) is coming along nicely even though it's mostly still the natural clay. Onions and spinach doing well.


General view. The two big beds on the left got a lot of attention today. The canes are for the overflow broad beans.



My lovely greenhouse. Looks good but really needs a clean.

I planted out pak choi and rocket. To stop the birds eating them, I made a frame out of bamboo and netting. It took me ages and, in the middle of doing it, I nearly set fire to it in frustration. Not pretty, let's hope that it works.

I put more potatoes in. I'm really getting into dividing the plots into squares with salad plants acting as a dividing line.

I planted a whole load of salad things into the new bed at the side of the greenhouse:

• spring onion
• radish
• chard
• rocket
• spinach

The bed itself is divided into squares (roughly 12"), so hopefully will look pretty.

I planted some peas (a nice long row in the bed behind the garage), more carrots and, as I forgot them last week, some radishes. I'll do more work tomorrow, but I've been thinking about how to grow cabbages etc without them being eaten. The picture is of the winter cabbages. Those protected by netting survived, everything else (the cauliflower) has been eaten by birds (I suspect the pheasants).

I think that I need a frame!

The roof has been waterproofed and fitted with guttering. A long saga of plans gone slightly awry (which I'm not going to describe, suffice to say that the coop is on sloping ground).



The guttering just slots together, unfortunately to finish it, I need a right angle bend and can I find one?

Tags: chickens

A lovely sunny day, so I've been digging and planting. First though, the good news, the second batch of tomatoes are starting to come through.

In the greenhouse:

Runner bean - butler
Dwarf french bean - The Prince
Runner bean - enorma elite
Broad bean - masterpiece Green Longpod

In the propagator:
Sage
Basil
Oregano

In the ground:
Beetroot

Tags: herbs

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh! Lost more plants to damping off, this time it's the chilli peppers. I've sown some more (Ring of Fire). Luckily I collected loads of seeds. I also popped in another row of carrots.

My tomatoes and peppers had come up and so I removed them from the propagator because I've killed them in the past by leaving them in too long. Despite the greenhouse being heated, the tomatoes (all but one) died on me. Looks like 'damping off'. Given that I used a mist sprayer to keep them damp, it's probably my own fault. I've sown some more.

In a fit of enthusiasm, I sowed pak choi (Colour and Crunch F1) and some Rocket.

In the garden I sowed some carrots (Early Nantes 5). I've accidentally bought the sort that come in a paper strip. A little strange, but were very easy to put into the ground. I'll sow a row a week for a while.

After yesterday's chicken coop re-roofing, I had a light day in the garden digging more compost into the beds ready for sowing. I sowed some broad beans and parsnip too whilst I was at it. No sign of any shoots from the seeds that I sowed last week.

This was my first full weekend in a while and the weather looked ok, so I decided to fit the chicken coop's new roof. I took about half an hour to pull off the old one before I could start fitting the pre-made A frames.



After that I started to fit the roof timber. These are classic lapped planks. Shortly after this it started snowing.



So I moved inside and fitted some of the bracing. The A frames are 2"x2", so should hold a fair amount of weight.



I thought that it would be easier to paint the roof as I built it. The final result is a rather smart dark stained wood roof. It took me about 5 hours in the end.



It's not quite finished - I'm going to add some guttering and water barrels at some point this spring.

Tags: chickens, blog

The weather's been milder (although much colder than California where I was last week). I've planted up the seeds that I saved last year from my chilli peppers (Ring of Fire) and sweet red peppers (Quadrato d’Asti Rosso). I've also planted up 8 Gardener's Delight tomatoes; I'm not sure if I'll bother planting other varieties this year.

They're in the propagator now, we'll see how they do. Meanwhile, I decided to have a look at the cuttings that I took last year. I have been surprisingly successful with 3 rosemary plants (lots of root), 8 box plants (less root, but root nonetheless) and 3 curry plant.

When I built the chicken coop last year, I couldn't get hold of decent corrugated plastic roofing and I didn't have enough of a slope on the roof. The end result is a leaky roof, damp chickens and some bodging. It looks rather sad, compared to when it was built. See below


This has to be fixed so I'm building a full roof with a solid, lapped roof. As this is quite a lot of wood, I need to strengthen the uprights in the center of the coop.

I've added 4 columns plus two cross bars in 2"x2". The cross bars effectively hold the sides of the coop in. They were already been pushed out by the weight of large puddles of rainwater that collect on the roof. The corners are ok as they are as the sides form L columns. It already helps hold up the saggy, puddled roof. All I need to do now is to build the A frames for the peaked roof. I've built one, just 4 more to go.

Tags: chickens, blog

Over christmas I sorted my seeds. Some are past their plant by dates; others are ok, but not what I want to grow. I took some into work for swapping. Gill and I went to the garden center and, despite having loads of seeds, I couldn't resist some seeds - Fennel, Pak Choi, Chinese cabbage, chard (multicoloured) and carrots. Looking forward to getting planting in February in the greenhouse.

Tags: blog

Well, it’s stopped raining and, with the clear blue skies, got an awful lot colder. Very heavy frost today plus a very slight drizzle of snow. Nothing for it but to use my new spade and dig some compost into the empty bed ready for planting in April. Looks pretty doesn’t it? This took about a quarter of one of my big compost heaps. The top half was not well composted, but I put it into the bottom of each trench anyway, it will break up and rot in the next few months. I’ve also been planning where to plant things in 2010. I don’t follow a proper crop rotation as I usually end up with lines of different things. What I make sure of though is that I don’t plant the same sort of plant in the same place two years in a row. Works pretty well.

Tags: blog