Gardening. It’s a dirty job but someones got to do it.

Well the chance to move to the North of Scotland fell through so the thought of using the garden as not just a place to store my potato plants has came flooding back.

photo credit: southgeist

Between our front garden basically being a moss bed and our back garden being a sodden lump of clay we have our work cut out for us. I’ve always known the front garden, under the living room window at least, was very shallow. I had a great deal of trouble planting the roses last summer as I just couldn’t find anywhere that didn’t have hardcore or concrete less than 6 inches under the surface. With this in mind I set about building a raised flower bed under the window to give the plants something to grow into. I think it’s not bad but it could have been built far stronger if I’d thought about it more. For instance the top soil is pushing the frame out from the wall as I only built 3 sides to it and didn’t anchor the corner pegs in well enough. It seems to have settled down now though and after a friday night of planting bedding plants at 10pm with my wife it looks not bad. Now we just have to hope the grass seed we sowed comes through OK and helps cover up the mess that was made. Thats one tonne of topsoil used up and 2 more to go. I’ll get those bags moved from the side of my house one of these days. Vonnie also tried to plant our cherry tree thats been languishing on our patio since last summer. Every place we come up with to plant it ends up having problems. We have a corner of our garden that the kids use as a short cut all the time and that has worn away the grass over the years and we hoped that by planting the tree they’d stop cutting that corner but as we found out the shallow topsoil covers our whole garden and not just under the window.

In the back garden we chopped down the rest of the hedge and hired a chipper so that we could use the waste on the chicken run floor as well as a mulch for the rest of the garden. We were expecting a small almost useless shredder for the price we were paying but as the hire company had got a new model in they gave us that for the same price. For an electric shredder it was a beast and my hands and arms are covered in small cuts from the branches as it ate them up. That will teach me not to wear gardening gloves and long sleeves! We were caught out with the weekend hire though and so only managed two thirds of the hedge but we plan on burning the rest over the coming week.

On Saturday we decided to build up the kids swing set which had been hidden in our loft for the last 18 months. Everything was going fine until we had all the sections laid out and had started building it. The rain started. Then the thunder came. I’m not sure just how safe building a metal frame in my garden which backs on to an electrical substation during the thunder storm is. Needless to say I panicked a bit when the first flash of lightning came.

My cucumber and tomato plants are are coming on well but unfortunately the fw that I managed to plant outside really didn’t like the weather last week and didn’t make it. My pepper and chilli plants are coming along now although they are still very slow in growing. As for the potatoes, I only planted 4 tubs as I ran out of containers but they are growing like wildfire. I’m having trouble giving them enough water I think as they just soak it up.