If I was to tell you just exactly what my hard work in the garden over this last week has produced you wouldn’t believe me. Well anyone that knows me might now that I think about it.

photo credit: clara & james

My plans for the vegetable patch have completely fallen through. An opportunity has popped up for my wife that should it pan out we would be relocating 200 miles before the end of the summer. With that in mind and after some ideas were thrown at me at the self-sufficientish forum I’ve decided to keep everything in tubs and pots for now. Far more easily movable and it means I can try and make the garden look like a nicer place in order to try and sell the house. I’ve managed to get a few pots of potatoes planted on the patio and the garlic that was planted was looking good as well. Not quite sure what to do about the onions and lettuces though as I don’t know just how big a pot they need to grow well. The tomato and cucumber seedlings are flourishing and as per usual I’m stuck with huge amounts of healthy seedlings that I have no real use for. The bell and jalapeño pepper seeds have finally started to sprout so I’m really happy about that although I’m now wondering just how they’ll survive outside of the propagator. We now have 75% of our hedge chopped right back and once again I’m left with a garden full of branches that I can’t compost and no local tool hire place will hire out chippers for non-commercial use any more. That will be another 2-3 days worth of tying branches up into 6′ bundles and hoping the local council will be nice enough to pick them up for us then.

Our chickens are not paying for their keep yet. No eggs although we are sure Bunty is laying them somewhere in the garden. We just can’t find where. We’ll here a squawk and when we go looking we’ll find her running about with Mac as if nothing happened and no sign of an egg. Could be anywhere in our garden right enough. We had some sad news the other night with regards our chicks. One of the silkies had splayed legs and despite splinting them one leg refused to strengthen up and was effectively lame. it wasn’t eating well and was getting bullied by the other chicks so there was no real chance of it making it much further. We’ll leave out what happened but after putting it to sleep we now have only four chicks left. We do now have 6 runner duck eggs in the incubator so I’m expecting the garden to completely go to pieces over the next few months!