Wednesday 16 May 2012

Weeding, money saving and EXCITING PROGRESS

Today I went out in the garden as soon as I got home from work and did a load of weeding; the weather forecast for the next four days is rain so I thought I'd take advantage of the sunny conditions.

My target was the overgrown areas behind the main vegetable beds and this leads me to a little hint and tip for you:

Always dig your vegetable patches with access from both sides.

Yes, an obvious one, but the contortions I had to go through to get behind my vegetable patches were CRAZY and I've got a fair few scratches from the bushes and trees I was crawling through (and stings from the nettles).

I was successful though. When I started it looked like this:

Behind the parsnips and carrots

Behind the onions, shallots and garlic

As you can see, the undergrowth is very lush where I've not dug it out, and it does creep so my aim was to take as much out as I could (not digging it over, just basically clearing through) and I achieved the following in about half an hour of effort:

Behind the carrots/parsnips

Behind the onions, shallots and garlic.

There is still some clearing to be done, but I removed two wheel barrows full of stingers, sticky weeds and other stuff. So that is better than it was.

While I was struggling around behind the polytunnels I noticed that it looks like there are some seedlings developing where the parsnips and carrots are!!! I am SO excited, I really thought they had rotted in the ground.



Finally, as I am getting ready for repotting the tomatoes (ready to give away a fair number to any of you nice people who want them) I have been struggling to find enough pots. Then I remembered that in the shed there were some Candy floss pots.

The pile of candyfloss pots.

So I decided to get my new drill and make these into pots for tomato plants.

It did not take me long to drill three drainage holes in each pot and now I think I have enough pots to split up the plants for y'all.

My housemate's family runs a flower business and he had also got me a load of boxes to convert to planters (for my own tomatoes, and also possibly some lettuces and horse radish) so I took the opportunity of converting these.

The box prior to drillage

About to drill.

I managed to take this while I was drilling. Took a photo of my foot and one up my nose in the process :D

Six holes drilled out as drainage holes.

So, there you have it.

Thanks for reading again.




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