Diary of a Permaculture (ish) garden, March 2018.

You can have enough of snow, right?!

I definitely have, and there's more forecast for next week (which is typical as I've taken a week off work to sort the garden!).  

Sometimes the only thing to do is to sit inside and organise your seed tin.  I think it's rather beautiful now with these new card dividers I made. 

We've had a couple of sunny days in-between the rain and snow.  Last week I even slapped some suncream on my neck, it was that toasty!  I'm trying to get on top the of weeding early this year, before they take over!  They're coming out of the woodchipped area really easily right now, which is a big help. 

My raised beds still have some growth despite the sub-zero, freeze-y temperatures.  I'm really pleased with my perennial Siberian onions, they've grown loads since last month and look really healthy. 

I picked a couple of carrots that had overwintered in the raised beds, and a brilliant comedy leggy one which sadly went in the compost because slugs had eaten it!

I ordered some bare root trees and they came really quickly and were a lot bigger than I expected!  I got a cherry tree for the front garden (the variety is 'Sweetheart') and some Cherry Plums (Prunus cerasifera 'Myrobalan'). The cherry plums only cost £1.95 each and they're huge.  They're supposed to grow fast, which is what I want to cover some of the fence and block the neighbours a bit, as nice as they are I like my privacy while I'm gardening in my PJs and the one side feels really open since the new neighbour cut down all the trees.  

I don't know if you can tell from this photo, but I moved a few plants around, a Physocarpus 'Midnight' that didn't seem very happy over the other side of the garden, a Rowan tree and one of the Poundland roses my mum bought for me. 

I planted one of my cherry plums down the side garden too, there are privacy issues there too, again nice neighbours, but their garden is at least a foot taller than ours (we live on a slope!) so we can see their heads bobbing along over the fence, and it perturbs me!   I've also been weeding down here and pruned all my autumn raspberries down.  You can see I've cut the raspberry canes into smaller pieces and left them on the ground there, to kind of mulch the ground to stop weeds and so they'll rot down in situ and return their nutrients to the soil.   

I still have 2 more cherry plums to plant (they only sold them in multiples of 5!  I hope I like them!) and the cherry tree too, but currently the front garden looks like this so they'll have to wait!

I transplanted a patch of wild strawberries to the back of the garden between these two cobnuts, and planted a tiny wild garlic plant I bought (at the same time as my fruit trees) right at the back of the garden for future years harvests.

The heated propagators I bought have been working quite well, one seems better than the other, I don't know if that's down to the seeds or the propagators themselves.  I've popped my red onion seedlings in the greenhouse outside (scuse the messy greenhouse, it needs cleaning!). They were getting floppy in the conservatory so maybe it was too warm for them in there.

  

I bought some new blueberry plants too - these ones have pink berries, the variety is 'Pink Lemonade'.  I've got about 8 blueberry plants now, so I should probably stop buying them!

And here's the whole garden.

And here's a really big worm too! 

In 2017 there was a lot less snow in March, and in 2016 I was building my little greenhouse and planting potatoes and in March 2015 I still had my balcony garden! 

How's your garden this month?  I sincerely hope you have less snow than me, and I wish you lots of warm spring days. 

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