Happy, happy birthday to our lovely Elaine.
A busy day on the smallholding with a tunnel to make better sense of. I have plants everywhere and I need a better system to cope with the frosts we are still getting. Pete helped me out with the heavier lifting and I feel that the space works better. Everything is coming on now but we had a very hard frost last night so the plant fleece was out again.
Potting on became the theme for the day with stocks, petunias and snapdragons all enjoying a bit more space to spread now. Little gem lettuces are all planted out into their final container for harvesting in a few weeks. I have some seeds ready to be planted with my little helper, Angus, tomorrow and my sweet peas to plant into grow bags. By the end of the weekend I will be well on track. I am still making new free plants at every opportunity so that I will have enough for the June sale weekend.
My mother is going to start coming up to help one morning a week. What she doesn't know about growing is probably not worth knowing. Mother and I can lose hours in the polytunnel. I have some large tin cans to paint and then plant up offering my customers something a bit different this year.
I have started to move some pots round to the area just beyond the back door that I want to turn into a productive space. We are still holding back putting much in the ground because it is so cold again. Pete put seaweed on the raised vegetable beds and that has now rotted down and they need turning over. I am not absolutely sure what is going in there this year because we had such a bad time with slugs last year. I am kind of leaving that part to Pete.
I love finding new ways to grow and I even have a Pinterest board dedicated to it. We have grown our potatoes in stacks of car tyres for years as the yield is so high with this method. I checked on the willow crop which appears to be surviving the cold nights well and has lots of new growth. We appear to have a problem with a perennial weed on the smallholding and that is marching towards the willow - we need to take action. I have a cottage garden seed mix for direct sow to go near my new studio. That should keep me entertained with butterflies and bees through the summer months. So, lots still to do on the planting front and that will keep me out of trouble.
I do hope some of you have had some lovely time in your gardens and that you have a little more sunshine than us.
Until tomorrow. xx
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