Ok so this might be alight exaggeration... But the herb bed now has the beginnings of a path in it...
I know it probably doesn't look like much but it is using some of the stones which have been taken away from the "rockery" which is now being removed.
I was never that keen on it but had just recently decided to plant it up this year to hide away the unsightly concrete. But now this gives me room to plan a new much lighter structure *giggles*
Anyway back to the Herb Bed, I have started to move herbs out of the window boxes they have been living in for the last year and set them into the bed.
From this herb box I have extracted one plant each of the chives and parsley and have split them and replanted. The parsley was simple to split as it almost did this itself when it was lifted out. But the chives required slightly more brute force as they had a nicely 'woven' root ball.
This just required finding a suitable place to split the bunch at soil level and working that split down through the roots. Don't worry about ripping some of the roots but try to tease apart the majority of them, if this is particularly difficult you could try soaking the root ball as this is supposed to help although I have never had to do it yet.
With the new path and plants the herb bed is starting to take on more of a gardeny feel to it. I cant wait for the day when it is all complete and there are a wide range of herbs for me to choose from just outside my door... Heaven...
I had not expected to have been able to do much work in the garden this month as I have a VERY busy schedule at uni at the moment. We are doing what are classed as "short fat" courses because of the way they apear on our timetables as a 3 week long block of lectures lasting all day every day. Or it is possible for them to be that lecture intensive... Luckily mine have not been 9-6 every day and have given time for us to do their assignments fairly easily.
Anyways enough about lectures. I have managed to get out in the garden a little this month as my photos of spring appearing proved, but this time I actually managed to do some garden work.
In the second week I planted some seeds and used the space under our stairs to germinate them as it is usually nice and warm in there.
I planted some tomato seeds bought from Thompson & Morgan and placed them where it was nice and warm, on top of the radiator covered in a plastic bag (as it said to on the packet) and I only got two rather sickly seedlings pop their heads up.
On the other hand my butter nut squash seeds which were taken from inside a squash I cooked for dinner last year have come up brilliantly. There was possibly one seed which didn't produce a seedling and two are a little weaker than the rest but all in all I am very happy with these seeds :D
In addition to this I planted some mixed salad seeds in a planter to be able to have some fresh home grown produce soon.
A week on and the Butter nut seedlings needed potting on so my collection of sauce pots and bottoms of milk cartons finally had a chance to shine and became a selection of small containers (after having poked holes in the base of them).
I also found a plastic 'greenhouse' in town for a fiver so decided I would have to try this out and see if it worked or not. It is a similar size and shape to a traditional cold frame with a zip opening at the top to be able to put the plants in and then close up again. I have decided to put this on the roof area that I use to pot up plants because it has a much higher chance of getting enough sunlight to heat up during the day here. After being up for one day I ventured outside this evening after uni and found that it had blown over, unsurprisingly since I did not fix it down at all. It now has two bricks to hold it in place and we will see how this works shortly I expect.
I have placed the salad container and most of the butter nut seedlings under the protection of this device, but have kept a few in the kitchen incase it doesn't work.
Today I actually did some physical work in the garden by de-weeding and de-creepering the bed I plan to try and use for veg.
Here is a basic drawing of the bed in question. I will point out that it says newly FORKED bed and not anything else which it may be read as...
This bed has been left from when I moved in to see what would come up over the year and not much did, there was the odd plant in the front of the bed, otherwise this section was bare.
The back of the bed contains a Jasmin and a few other unknown (at least to me) plants and a very strange rock feature (pile). The very left of the front section of the bed has quite substantial ivy covering with a well established tree so I have limited the edge of the soon to be veg plot to where the tree is situated.
Today I dug this over and removed all the ivy and Jasmine creepers along with a large number of stones! I was very heartened to see a large number of worms in this bed considering how little has been growing there. I also mixed two bags of soil, which have come from my nans garden, into the bed to raise the soil level.
Now all I have to do is to wait and see if I have the same level of success with the second set of squash seeds and see if the plants survive the 'greenhouse' experiment...
Trying to make my mark on the garden has been a trial when I'm working around what is already there especially since a lot of the back of the garden is overgrown and the plants, although nice, are just a bunch of straggly bushes that have grown up unchecked over the last how every many years.
In making my mark on the garden I am cutting these plants back to see what there is in the rest of the beds and waiting for them to come back in spring and see how they then react and how they can be incorporated into the garden.
The back beds are raised up from the lawn but having cut the plants back I can see that this bed is split into two and the second bed (at the back) is raised up from the first bed by a small amount. In addition to this we can now see a 'rock feature' that is present in the back left corner of the garden which looks like it was possibly aimed to be a water feature but never really made it to completion. I will have to see how the plants grow around it in the summer as to what I will eventually do with it. It will probably just end up being a support for growing plants up/on.
There are plans in the pipe line for the two bed areas, the back one will have the main bedding plants, providing the visual part of the border whilst the front bed can support a small veg garden. It would be nice to get some form of self sufficiency going even though we only have a small 'town garden', but we will see how this idea progresses the bed seems to need a fair bit of work doing to it before it would support any veg I think. So it may not be this time round that the bed is good enough for planting but I'm keeping my fingers crossed
The front bed currently only contains a tree, one sickly looking honeysuckle a confer hedge and an old lavender bush. This bed I am planning to convert into a herb garden, eventually moving the lavender from the steps side to replacing the conifer hedge but this will take time since I have decided to put in a new lavender bushes so will take a few years to grow from cuttings. But the plan is there, and that is all that matters at the moment.
Currently the paved area of my garden is a mess of logs and cut down shrubbery waiting for the garden waste to be collected so I can put this into the bags. Our garden waste is collected in two green sacks every other Tuesday, which has meant that there has been a pile of hedge cuttings on our front 'lawn' for a while now, waiting to be fitted into the bags and removed! Nearly all gone now though.
Not all of the stuff we have removed from the garden this time round will go in the garden waste, some of the larger pieces are being logged and stacked in the garage to dry so that we can burn them in the wood burner in our kitchen. I have also gained two sacks of logs from my grandparents garden which will also go to help keeping us warm this winter. Bring on the reduced heating bills!!
