2 of the apple tree's which were planted last september seem to have little apple's appearing, hopefully they'll grow on into something nice and juicy.

Have been late planting out to the 3 raised beds, it's been a bit of a struggle to keep the plants in the greenhouse alive for the past month or so as the day's have been ultra hot, the spuds seem to be growing away, bushy but no great height, don't know why this is but I'm sure time will tell.

Continued with my digging today and as I dug the afternoon away 3 works kept popping into my mind, 'no dig gardening'. Certainly going to check it out.

Plenty signs of life in the garden.

Beds are done

Finished off digging over the last 2 beds, so a bit of fertilizer next week, a bit of luck after that and I'll just have to wait and see what happens. The beds are 9'x6' approx so I'm not going to be exactly feeding the extended family for the year as I have just discovered cabbage need 2'x2', cauliflowers need 2'x2' brussel sprouts 2'x2' and so on but it should be a good introduction for me. Also got the rest of the grass cut, just a light topping, its hard to beat the smell of newly mown grass.

This is tomorrows project, weather permitting. Going to try to turn this into more veg ground. I can feel the pain already.

Allotment work today

This is my mini allotment area, here I intend to grow the usual veggies and some fruit. This is one of the 3 raised beds I made late last year and I gave it a bit of a dig over today, simply to get rid of stones and get a better tilt. The soil itself is clay, and I haven't time this year to remedy that, neither have I had time to adjust PH and nutrient values, just going to go with the flow this year and hope for the best. I'm going to use another area to grow spuds and in line with what Derek Brooks says, I'm going to use a 4 year rotation. The only thing I'm going to do this year is to add some fertilizer a month or so before sowing or planting.



I also planted some strawberry plants today, 18 in all. These I grew from seed around this time last year and kept them in 3'' pots at the bottom of the garden since last summer. Again the soil is clay and I have dug in some compost to try and remedy this. All I need now are some nice tasty strawberries. They are either Sarian or Florian or maybe a bit of both, don't know, had a bit of an identity crisis last year.



These are some cyclamen grown from seed last year, very slow progress, hopefully I'll be using come October. Had them in 2'' pots and again left them at the bottom of the garden since late last summer. Today I potted them on into 3'' pots, so hopefully the bit of new compost will give them a bit of a boost.