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Tuesday 1 February 2011

Chapter 5.... Clearing the way for the new season

  2010 turned out to be a pretty good year on the whole, although I did let the weeds have a bit of a free run of the site for the last bit of the growing season..... the result of that is some pretty serious cleaning up needed again this year to get the ground and the established plantings ship shape again.

 Last weekend saw me getting started on that, with the herb bed at the far end of the garden getting most of the attention. It needed a good old prune first to get rid of all the dead stuff, followed by a bit of a weeding. I was pleased to see quite a few of the plants starting to shoot again, especially the Bronze fennel, Caraway and red veined Sorrel, although no doubt the frosts this weekend have slowed them down a bit. My pineapple sage looks like it may have given up the ghost at some point through the winter.... maybe it will shoot again, but I fear I may need to find another :(  Sunday saw me throwing some Fish blood and bone all around the herbs, and then following after with the hoe to remove any weeds and get the fert into the ground. 


The fruit trees got some attention after that, and the last two apple trees had their haircut before the new season starts. I have a row of eight mixed dessert and cooking apple trees along the side of the veg garden which I cut back quite a lot last year as they were getting too big for their boots, and they were starting to grow into some slightly funny shapes. Even after their major surgery last year, they actually produced some pretty good crops of fruit, so i'm hoping that this year they will be even better again. The raspberry patch had a few newcomers in the shape of some runners that I potted up last year... I slotted those into a few gaps in the rows to thicken it up a bit.

 Sunday turned out to be gorgeous in the garden... the sun was out, the wind was bracing, the birds were everywhere, including two woodpeckers playing the drums in one of the poplar trees behind the garden..... and everything else was going brilliantly! It was an absolute pleasure to be out there! Don't you just love days like that! :)

1 comment:

  1. Absolutely it was great out there on Sunday, looking forward to more days like that!

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