Digging it……

February 22, 2015 by Elaine 4 Comments

With the weather forecast predicting colder temperatures and even the possibility of snow in the next week or so, I decided to take advantage of the bright if luke warm sun yesterday and made a start on getting my beds ready for this years growing season. My garden has been woefully neglected this last few months and looked very bedraggled and over run when I surveyed it first thing, as you can see from the ‘ before’ pictures in this post.

I have deliberately omitted any close up pictures of my even more bedraggled looking greenhouses – they will be undergoing their annual spring clean in the next week or two. Only then I will show you how pretty and sparkling they look.

The generally unkempt appearance of the garden, isn’t helped at all by the multitude of Silver Birch branches and twigs that have fallen across the whole of the vegetable patch. The two offending trees are beautiful to look at, with their distinctive white bark covered trunks and impressive height but they do add significantly to the burden of keeping the garden tidy and I dread what mess I will find, after a windy period of weather. Yesterday, armfuls of long, spindly twigs and branches made their way onto the shredding pile and some of the smaller twigs found their way into the brown garden waste bin. I deliberately don’t put these twigs into our garden compost bins because they take forever to break down.

Talking of the compost bins, I was able to use a quarter of the contents of each bin to enrich the raised bed section I cleared yesterday and there is still enough to do at least part of the other set of raised beds. The last of the chicken manure pellets went onto the beds by the fence but I still need to get some manure or some such thing for the normal beds.

At the moment there is a heavy frost outside and so it is unlikely that I will be able to continue from where I left off but if the weather warms up enough for me to be able to turn over the ground, then I will wrap up warm and get out there. Now that I have started, I want to get finished and with my onion sets due to be planted out in a couple of weeks, there is a new urgency to get everything done.