The Winter Garden

We've got three crops over-wintering this year. In the right hand bed are leeks, which we've done before and which are coming on well. As soon as we have finished the last of the carrots we will start eating these. Or maybe even before...
Two new crops for me are purple sprouting broccoli, at the back by the fence, due to flower in February, and cauliflowers, in the left hand bed, due February/March. I'm looking forward to being able to eat home grown broccoli and cauliflowers, so I hope they do alright.


While I was taking these photos I saw these little narcissus in flower. They are right by the house, so sheltered from the wind.

And here in the front you can see what the wind did to some of our fences! Luckily none of my plants or shrubs was damaged.

A Wild January Night

The wind has been blowing hard here since this morning. Three of our fences were down when we got home and we had to go out and put them back up in the dark. I held (and wound) the wind-up torch and Braveheart lifted up the panels and replaced them. One or two of them are nearly just a pile of sticks now but if they can last until the weekend we can send out a repair party.
On the way to and from work the roads were covered with branches and even, in a few places, a tree.

All this makes me very happy to have finished and be snuggling under my Babette Blanket, the perfect companion for this weather. I started this in 2007, I think, and made excellent progress for a few months. In November of last year I decided I would like to put together all the squares I had crocheted, and then I was determined to finish it.

Even though it's January, we have started thinking about this year's vegetable gardening. We bought shallot and onion sets at the weekend, so have  now got to work out where they should go to follow the crop rotation.

What I'm reading:
The Bones of Avalon

Worth the Wait

I started this cardigan, the Must Have Cardigan, in May 2009. I finished the back and started the sleeves by the end of that summer, and then we moved, and I didn't touch it for the whole of 2010. I restarted it this year in March and finished it at the weekend. I love it!

The buttons are from The Textile Garden, I bought them at the Ravelry Day in Coventry in 2009.

The Vegetable Garden - April

The vegetable garden is really taking shape now, and the wonderful weather we have had for the last week, and the longer evenings, have meant we can get out into the garden for longer and get a lot of weeding done.

On the right you can see the raspberry canes and the strawberry patch; and the second raised vegetable bed is now under construction. This will have peas, beans, pumpkins and squashes in it this year.

On the left at the back are the mounds where the first early potatoes have been planted. We're trying Arran Pilot this year. This bed is also destined to have sweet corn, broccoli and cauliflower in due course. In the raised bed, spring greens/cabbages, onions and garlic and some radishes. Carrots and parsnips will go in the middle.

The greenhouse is now in use, with tomatoes, peppers, chillis and basil on the staging, and on the left are seed trays in which I have just sown the squashes, pumpkins and courgettes, some more sweet peas and marigolds and salvias for summer bedding.

The new trees have leaves! which is very exciting.

Wandering into the front garden, there are already some new flowers in the last couple of weeks:

scarlet tulips, and the first bluebells (and can you spot the Heuchera pushing its way through the patchof bluebell leaves there).

The beautiful creamy blossoms of Viburnum;

and this lovely white-flowered cascade, in the shady bed where I have also just found my hostas coming through. They were smothered in weeds, but are actually doing quite well. A bit more weeding needed here, and I also have some Convallaria and some Hellebores to plant.

The Flower Garden - March

Time for me to take some photos of how the garden is looking this month, so we can see, at the end of the year, which parts of the flowerbeds could be improved and how to get the best from each season.

There is a lot going on in all the flowerbeds at the moment, the front garden has most flowers, with a lovely show of daffodils and muscari.

There are lots more bulbs coming up and the aubretia is just getting going as well.

Elsewhere, it is mostly leaves emerging for the new season so far.

In the back, there are some lovely tulips now in flower and the alliums we planted last year are coming up but of course not yet flowering, and the primroses I planted in containers are starting to look very pretty too.

Apple Trees

As we arrived home at lunchtime on Friday, I said to Braveheart - I wonder when our apple trees will arrive? They are supposed to come between mid-Feb and March. I think I'll phone Thompson and Morgan and see when they are planning to dispatch them.

About an hour later, before I had got around to making my phone call, there was a knock at the door and a UPS guy delivered a HUGE tall box with three apple trees in.

So when we had finished putting the louvres and the last pane of glass in the greenhouse, we set about planting our new apple trees. First we faffed about for a while trying to remember where we had planned to put them. After a lot of measuring and placing of plant pots we settled on three locations which left a suitable space for a fourth tree in due course. We also had ready three large tree stakes, three tree ties, some bags of manure and a bag of bark chippings.

We marked out the edges of each hole as a 2 foot diameter around the tree and cut away the turf. Then we began digging. We measured the depth of the planting hole by placing the tree in the hole and checking that the earth would come up to its previous planting mark with some space for a layer of bark chippings. Once dug, we poured in a can of water and left it to soak away while Braveheart hammered in the stake.

Then we added some manure to the earth in the bottom of the hole, and some Root Grow, before placing the tree in the hole and filling it with earth to the correct depth.

Finally bark chips were added, and the tie was attached to tree and stake.

Our trees are a Bramley, a Braeburn and a Cox's Orange Pippin.

Meanwhile, indoors, the seeds I sowed last weekend are doing well. Tomatoes,

Broccoli and Sweet Pea seedlings are all growing well.

Greenhouse Progress

Since my last post on the greenhouse project, we have worked on the construction whenever we had spare time and it wasn't raining, which unfortunately wasn't as often as we would have liked.

We opened up the boxes with the greenhouse bits in and laid out all the pieces on the patio. We counted every single item and checked it off against the parts list!

The first step was to assemble the front, back and sides separately.

Then we put them together and added the roof section.

The greenhouse at this stage is very light, so we carried it carefully across the lawn to its final location, where we placed it into its base, and checked that everything was squared up and that it all fitted.

The foundation was completed with a path, gravel around the edges and we dug over the vegetable beds which will be inside.

Then we fastened everything down.

The final stage was to make up the door and window vents, and to put the glass on. This took a surprisingly long time, and we have so far completed the roof. This morning our new glass roof was covered in frost! It seems to have survived, though.