In between trips, and now that I'm home properly, we've been getting on with the garden. I'll post about all of the different bits of the garden properly with photos, but for now, here's a quick rundown:
Vegetable bed
Today we finally finished constructing the first vegetable bed. It has seemed to take a long time to complete, but eventually we got there. It still needs to be painted (and we need to decide whether to render it first of all), and the wood on the top needs to be stained, but the building work is complete. My in-laws brought down some rubble and we collected some small rocks from our garden to put in the bottom, then added some polystyrene. We then added a number of bags of earth that my in-laws also brought - they had dug some foundations for a feature in their garden and didn't need the earth that they removed. It's not very full yet, but we'll slowly add more earth, plus some ash and compost before we start planting. We're aiming to dig the foundations for bed #2 over the next month.
Apple tree
The apple tree is chock full of apples, so hopefully that means we'll have a good crop this year. Obviously a number will fall in the wind before they're ripe, and some will inevitably be eaten by birds, but fingers crossed we will have plenty to make into apple crumble and put in the freezer to see us through to next year.
Herb garden
The herb garden is now mostly looking quite bare. The grape hyacinths have died back and I've taken most of the stalks out, and since coming back from holiday I've done a lot of weeding in the area. The sweet peas I planted in the herb garden are beautiful, and the tomato plants are flourishing. There are plenty of flowers, however I think really I need to take some of the stalks out to thin them a bit. This weekend I finally dug some holes to put the actual herbs in the herb garden. The rosemary and chives are now sunk into the garden, and today my mother-in-law brought me a bay tree which now needs to join them. This is the area that I really want to start planning.
Fir tree area
Excitingly, the fir trees are no more. My husband sawed out the remainders of the trees, and then dug out the roots with a spade and an axe. There's still one root to be taken out which he's working on, so slowly but surely it is getting there. The main difference it has made is that the garden looks much, much bigger. We can also see the plants behind the (former) fir tree area much better and we now have a new space to plant and do what we want with. For now, we need to take the final root out, remove stones and then just try to keep on top of the weeds.
Aside from that, I've been weeding, weeding and doing more weeding. I've also dug out a lot of the 'monster plant', collected apples, and pruned various plants including some ivy growing on the back fence.
The next jobs on my list are mostly pruning: I need to cut back our clematis where it's starting to strangle our acer, cut back some other plants (not 100% sure what they are), cut the cordyline back, and top the rowan trees. Other than that, it's a case of keeping on top of the weeding, and starting to dig the foundations for the next vegetable bed.
Next time, I'll post some pictures!
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