Sunday 28 June 2015

Gardening, June 2015.

This month we moved into our house, so I've had plenty of time to potter about in the garden.  

I tackled the side garden, it's another long raised bed, which seemed to be filled with a mixture of rubble and soil once I'd removed all the knee high weeds! 

I've planted herbs (sage, thyme, coriander, lavender, basil, all from plants bought cheap in supermarkets and Wilkinsons), a pumpkin and courgette at the back and some autumn raspberries.  I've ordered a compost bin online, and I'll put that on this side bit of garden too once it arrives.




My garden friend of the month is this cute little robin, he's so tame!

I've used some old paving stones (found in the garden!) to make little paths over the main raised bed in the back garden, and started planting flowers and veggies.  

Most of the flowers are bits of stuff taken from mum's garden and I've grown the veggies from seed.


These are rainbow chard seeds, but I also have spinach, spinach beet, beetroot and Japanese bunching onions sprouting up.

I carefully researched how to prune a Weigela (the pretty tree at the back of the bed, with pink and white flowers, you can see it in this blog post, but it had grown lots since then and was taking over the garden), then got carried away and cut practically all of it off!  Once I started snipping I could see it hadn't been done for years and it was all spindly and sad.  Hopefully the shock won't kill it and we'll have lots of flowers on it next year.

I love this little pot I planted with lettuce, marigolds and Japanese bunching onions.


This beautiful Belfast sink came from Joe's Dad's garden, it's super heavy so we're leaving it here with the tomato plants in for now, we might move it later when we've got our strength up!


This is my nursery area.  Before we moved I started some seeds off in these big plant pots (also left by the previous owners, and still full of soil!).  Those seeds are either planted out in the garden, or just about to be, and I've started some new seeds off to fill in the gaps later (I've got garlic chives, kale, lettuce, spring onions, sunflowers, nasturtiums, sweet peas and campanula at the moment).


I'm working hard to find things to cover the bare soil now, any ideas for nice plants (edible or otherwise) would be gratefully received!

How's your garden growing?

Linking up with Flaunt it Friday.

4 comments:

  1. Wow Susie your garden is coming on a treat - I have not planted as much this year , potatoes, peas, broadbean, toms and lettuce so far. I have never tried chard before what does it taste like??

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    1. Thanks Lorna, hope you're doing well?

      Chard is soo yummy, it's nicer than spinach, it tastes kind of green and earthy but not too bitter, I like the texture of it too, it doesn't wilt down as much as spinach does.

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  2. Wow, what a transformation! It must have taken you ages. I still regret not completely taking my raised bed back to bare ground when I first moved it. Instead, I've popped bulbs and plants in over the years in an ad-hoc fashion, which means the whole bed looks unplanned (and not in a nice way!).

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    1. I'm so glad I dug it out properly, you can definitely see the difference between the main bed where I dug all the weeds out, and the side bed where I just pulled as many weeds out as I could then hoed it. There are still weeds coming up everywhere down the side. I'm impatient for stuff to grow and cover up the soil now though! I'm fed up of looking at brown!

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