Gardening extravaganza!!

Well this Easter break has been pretty busy! Many UK Universities give us extra holidays (Good Friday, Easter Monday AND Tuesday), so Eddy and I decided to take the rest of this week off. We thought if the weather held we'd be able to do some gardening, our main aim was to sort our veggie patch. Of course being us, we decided on an elaborate plan which took much longer than we thought, all week basically!

Friday started with clearing the area we wanted to work in, mostly weeding, but also potting on some strawberry suckers which spread from last years strawberries (we had 9 plants... which produced over 100 baby plants between them. We chuched the small ones, potted on 90 plants, and worryingly we haven't tackled those that have set themselves in the original bed!

We then set about de-turfing some lawn to make more room. Of course we didn't want to throw the turfs away, but are using them as the base for another raised bed - so we dug a trench to save some topsoil, which we'll use to bury the turfs. Then Eddy de-turfed while I moved the turfs away. Then we dug the entire area over to one spade's depth. Not easy on clay... Then we had to break up the clods of earth more. Then build the raised bed frames and put them in place, fill the 5 beds (we bought lots of bags of topsoil - as we don't have a wheelbarrow it was much easier than getting a ton or so delivered to our drive - we could just carry the bags to the right place and open them out. Then we covered the paths with a thick mulch od bark chippings, planted Eddy's apple tree (my birthday present to him 15 months ago, but only bought yesterday - my tree will arrive later on this year.. after more major gardening). We also planted a few part-grown veggies as we haven't started many seeds yet... Overall we spent 7 days and a ton of money (mostly birthday and Christmas presents in the form of cash and garden vouchers), and we did 8 trips to garden centres/DIY places to get materials and have a good look around... I'm shattered, looking forward to work on Monday for a rest, but boy, what an achievement!


Area as it was early last summer


Dug over...


Bed frames in place and filled with soil


planted up!!

Our herb garden which we built last year is doing well, we just bought some more herbs to plant in it...



I've been doing a little stitching on Elliot and Buttons in the evenings, but less stitching than I planned to do this week! I'd share a photo but the camera battery is charging.

We are off to see family this weekend, hopefully I'll share photos early next week. My mum just rung to say I've been sent a voucher for 25% of framing at my favourite framers in April, so we'll go tomorrow, I've pulled out a pile of backlog framing that needs doing - may as well take advantage!!