Kitchen Garden Forum

Had the best day (so far) down here in Dorset - sunny & warm (ish) - even got a bit of a glow in the greenhouse! My Citrus look well happy & for the first time got my geraniums through a winter! Had to compost my last spuds - little mice got them, but don't feel bad as in the back room my seedlings are coming up & not looking spindly!

Westi

Dear Westi, i hope today has been as good for you as yesterday. Been sunny heer all day today, but just a little chillier, but things do seem to be drying out.

Been making good headway with the digging, i actually think i might beat it now.

Yes, what lovely two days! I dug in all the green manure and left large clods so that the frost can still break them down.
We also repaired our wire fencing because yesterday, to our horror, we discovered two rabbit holes, or at least digging attempts, in the brassica bed! There are not hidey holes on the allotment itself but lots of grass and dry stone walls all round it, so we checked our netting today and found two holes where the little blighter must have got in. so, hopefully, it is rabbit proof again now.
We also collected ten more wheelbarrow loads of manure and spread it on the 2013 potato bed. More work to be done this week!

Another beautiful day - finished off trimming the hedge row (going to be some monster fire coming up)! Dug up the last of the Jeruselum Artichokes but a lot were hollow, planted some shallot sets & mulched the rasberries, even was brave enough to take the environmesh off the overwintered broad beans as they seemed a bit wet under it & some were rotting throught the stem!

WOT!! Getting cold again....surprise me!

Westi

2 lovely days tomorrow should be the same then back to cold and wet,got a bit done down the plot have been building raised bed walls using turf dropped off by the council we have wrapped it in black polythene to help rot it down should have some nice soil next year, also been working on our new chicken coup its not far off finished just a couple more laying box's to to make and fit, the chickens are doing well we are getting 5 eggs a day off 7 chickens

We had our big bonfire on Saturday as it was quite still, and we have to be careful not to set the thatch on fire! My OH has been busy cutting down brambles and trimming back hedges, so lots of scratchy stuff to burn up, I look like I've been fighting cats! Hopefully this week he'll be able to get on with digging bramble roots out of the area we've decided to tackle this year (it's not that I'm lazy just I'm at work and he isn't at the moment).

Oh Yea - fighting cats - big cats in my case! The thickest gloves & jeans & loose everytime to the thorns. Have 2 big piles of trimmings to burn now - but will have lots of great wood ash for the beds!

Westi

Day after day of sunshine - I'm getting seriously disorientated

No need to get too flummoxed, Alan, all will be back to normal by the end of the week!

Fourth lovely day here, too. Even the honey bees were eagerly feeding off the snowdrops. And robins, blackbirds, thrushes, dunnocks and chaffinches are tuning up for spring. Great. Very tempted to sow lots of things in the greenhouse but control myself because it's likely to get jolly cold again.

This brief sunny spell has been very welcome for helping to dry the garden out a little and letting us get on with a few jobs, but by mid/late afternoon the temperature is dropping like a stone again, which is probably a good thing in holding me back from rushing out to sow everything far too early!

It was almost 100F in the greenhouse at lunchtime before I opened a couple of vents. The bees were out at the top of the garden in the sunshine, but the bottom corner of the garden in the shade was still covered in hoar frost and the bird bath was frozen. No wonder we get caught out planting too soon at this time of the year.

We had a frost and fog until around lunchtime and then the sun melted both away to produce a bright if chilly afternoon. Have managed to get lots of tidying up done around the various garden beds which helps to negate the need to sow more seed

VPM
x

-3 C on the way to work...in patchy fog. Fog persisted in patches for some of the day and frost stayed hard in the shade. I was able to progress some forking over though...in the Sunshine for a little while...

Clive.

Another day of wall-to-wall sunshine. Temperature in polytunnel at 9am was -3C; at 11am it was nudging above 33C

The lovely weather provoked me to make a gardening decision i've been agonising over ever since a forum member recommended I plant Sea Buckthorn in place of the failing escallonia. The escallonia has been hopeless on my site for years now, no-matter what I do it turns leggy and does not retain it's foliage.

Far to much science in gardening for me, i'm a practical man.

So, I ordered 100 bare root plants together with a root treatment called mycorrhiza, hows that for commitment.

I've been so impressed with the flying-insects results of the last ten years perennial wildflower growing that I branched out to other perennials of the cottage garden type.

Broad beans and French beans have been sown indoors along with a few herbs, yesterday was very productive. Amazing what a bit of warmth does.

Oh-yes, and we have lambs in the adjacent fields, what a lovely sound. Lambs calling the ewe and back-and-forth. Unfortunately we are also getting body-parts left by the fox in the stubble fields, always very sad.