Diary of a permaculture (ish) garden, April 2019.

I love this time of year when all the forget-me-nots go 'wooosh' and take over for a while.  They're one of my favourite flowers.

The weigela is flowering and the lilac too, the lilac smells so lovely. I always wanted a purple lilac to go with the white one at the bottom of the garden.  It turns out I already had one - I just had to let the branches from the old tree stump grow and bloom.  The people who had our house before us were monsters, who cuts down a lilac tree?!

My apple trees are blossoming too!  There's just one that didn't blossom last year and hasn't this year either, I don't know what's up with it, but if it doesn't buck it's ideas up I might have to dig it up.

This is my set up from last weekend, when I decided to empty my worm compost bin.  I thought it wasn't working ok because I'd never got any worm wee liquid out of it for the 3 years I've had it.  But turns out the tap was just on wonky and I there was a whole bucketful of liquid, plus a washing up bowl and half a bucket of worm castings.  I've reset the wormery with new coir bedding mixed with shredded paper and I'm going to start feeding them differently, chopping their food scraps into smaller pieces and burying it under the surface, it's supposed to reduce pests (like slugs, I found some mega slugs cleaning out the wormery!) and make decomposition quicker.  

All my fruit and nut trees have received a mulch of worm castings to give them a boost this growing season. 

In the front garden I planted my onions and garlic at the start of the month and they'd sprouted up by the end of the month!  I've planted some carrots and beets too that you can see in the second photo.

My onions are covered with enviromesh over part of a little greenhouse from wilkos, which was the easiest way to make a frame I could think of considering I have terrible woodwork skills.  I got onion fly on my onions last year and the only way to keep them off is to keep your onions covered so that's my plan this year. 

I've also planted my tomatoes and peppers out into my covered raised bed, I think it's warm enough now and they were taking over my kitchen worktops!  Some test tomatoes have gone out without cover into my upcycled big tomato basket in the back garden, I'll soon find out if it's warm enough out there!

 

I'm experimenting with biochar this year, you soak the charcoal-y bits in liquid fertiliser for a while, then mix it with your compost.  It releases the fertiliser and helps retain moisture in the soil too, I'm wondering if it will help if we get another super hot summer.  I've put it in my new raised beds in the front garden to test it out.

Look at this messy area!  Joe's taken the paving slabs off the weird steps that go nowhere, to lay a base for the bin store in the front garden, so now we have a muddy mound!  We're hoping to get someone in to look at the back garden soon to help us sort out a nice patio.  We dragged out a water feature left here by the previous house owners, so I'm going to clean that up and find a spot for it.

The side garden is looking nice, it's one of my favourite parts of the garden.  Only one of my tulips has come up successfully, but at least it's a pretty one! 

How's your garden doing? 

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