Veg prep and hedging

My week in gardens this week involved a variety of tasks. Always the unexpected, which is why I love being outdoors.

When I arrived at my Tuesday garden, over 100 Yew plants were in front of me. Myself and three others set to planting up a new hedge in the rain and sticky mud! Heavy and relentless work but great plants and instant hedging. Worth the result. Much more to do, each hole needed to be dug through old hedging roots and stones so it was slow going.

At Heale, both days involved an awful lot of Bamboo canes! Much preparation was done in the veg garden and it is looking good. We erected the 8 foot canes for our single corden Sweet peas. The soil has been double dug, the canes tied up and all that is left is to plant out early April and get the plants past the Slugs, Mice, Voles, anything that might fancy eating the tenders shoots. That is the time I dislike the most. Willing tiny seedlings and tender young plants on trying to avoid every possible problem along the way. Not to mention THE WEATHER!

We also marked out where we want to plant our Runner beans, French Beans, Dwarf beans, Peas, Broad beans, Cucumbers, Tomatoes and Cucamelons.

We dig a 1 foot deep pit for compost for each Cucumber/Tom/Courgette plant and this saves double digging the entire bed over. Nobody needs to be digging for no reason! Certainly my back tells me that often.

Th Cucamelons we tried to save seem to have rotted. A bit like a Dahlia tuber, we decided to dig up the plant from last year and store in just moist compost. When we went to check on the beauties they appeared to have shriveled up and left all their moisture in the soil. We will have to start again.

The weather was fairly kind this week, into March now and we had cold air, bit of rain, warm sunshine, hail, wind but man that warm sunshine seems to make up for a lot of Winter. What a lovely feeling, when the cloud pulls away and you get SUN! the joy.......

Country life is still keeping me on my toes. The Geese in the field with our Kune Kune pigs are feeling feisty and come at you like mad men in the morning. I am still startled and in awe of the Barn Owl that comes by early in the morning. So graceful. Sheep cross my path as I drive into work and look at my car as if to say "who are you?", not what my commute would involve in London town. I never thought I would get used to driving a quad bike around but somehow it all seems terribly normal now. Looking forward to the season.