Spring Garden

I know I promised my next post to be about Ceramics, but I haven't yet managed to take some pictures of complete items and I just couldn't resist posting some of the snaps that I took of the tubs in my garden a couple of days ago. They are all coming along nicely now, it looks like Spring has finally arrived - especially considering the weather that we have had over the past week.

This pic is of my extremely expensive greenhouse LOL. A bargain from The Range costing £12.99 which was half price. Makes a change me getting a bargain purchase.

On the right is my lavender which is just starting to send shoots off again. I have a few of these in tubs dotted around, and the smell from them in the Summer is absolutely wonderful. Especially if you rub your hand across them. I really do like the smell of lavender, but if I'm in a room with it for any length of time (e.g. a candle or air freshener), then it does start to give me a headache.

This one was an experiment. It's actually cress. Gen is keeping an eye on it to see how high she can grow it. I'm quite impressed with her efforts so far. whenever we have tried to grow cress in the past, she's forgotten to water it and it's gone all brown and yucky within a short time.

I'm good at experiments and this is another one .... believe it or not we're growing some lettuce in here. They're both mixed leaves and were planted a couple of weeks apart. I'm going to plant some more over the weekend to hopefully have a constant supply as we eat a lot of salad .... that's assuming that the damn snails don't get to em first. If you see tiny blue dots in any of the pictures, these are actually snail pellets that I've put down all around my garden to try and eradicate the problem that we have. (this area is fenced off from our doggie, therefore doesn't pose a problem for her.

ok, this shelf of the green house contains my favourites .... the back tray is strawberry seeds that we planted and the front tray contains yellow tomato seeds. The strawberry seedlings seem to be growing very nicely, however the tomatoes don't seem to be doing as good yet. I'm hoping that they will start to sprout in the coming weeks now that the weather has made a turn for the better.

I purchased 5 strawberry seedlings from B&Q last year and we got a wonderful crop from them. I'm hoping that we will have the same effect this year but from seeds. There will be a lot more plants than last year too if they all take when I plant them out, yummy strawberries and cream all summer long :-).

Gen is like myself, she absolutely adores tomatoes. I remember when I was her age, my grandad had a large greenhouse full of them. He always had at least 2 plants that were yellow, no-one was allowed near them except me. Last year Gen brought home a tomato seedling that she had planted at school. It grew very well in the conservatory, however unfortunately, we didn't get any fruit from it at all. So like I used to, she kept visiting my dad's greenhouse and pinching from her grandads crop.

Now these are something that I would never have considered planting, however when we were browsing in the garden centre they caught my eye. They are actually sweetcorn seedlings. I planted them in small pots last weekend after they had been in the greenhouse for a couple of months. I don't know if they will take or not, hence the small starter pots. But you never know with these things unless you give it a try now do you.

These are yet another item that is completely new to my garden. These seedlings are actually garden peas. They were planted at the same time as the sweet peas below, however they did sprout up quicker and are growing nicely. They are already putting feelers out ready for climbing. Once they are big enough, I plan to tie them to some string that I have for the fence. Hopefully we'll have a nice crop of fresh pod peas to have with our salad as I have 3 pots full of these.

Yes I do have some flowers in the garden too! The rectangular pots on the right contain sweet peas that I have planted directly outside. The smaller of the round pots on the left are also sweet peas, however these were given to me as seedlings that my mum had planted in her greenhouse. Hers are slightly more mature than mine, however will all of the ones that I have now I should get a really nice smelling crop during the summer ... and also plenty of seeds for next year! The larger pot in the left picture is a selection of mixed flower seeds that Gen planted.

Now I don't have a clue what these are, the yellow ones look like a flower from the daisy family, but I wouldn't swear it under oath. The purple ones are absolutely beautiful, altho unfortunately I think they were a little camera shy and didn't show up as well. I planted this tub last year with what I thought were bedding plants. It has been stuck in the corner of the garden over the winter, and hey presto just as I was about to dig all the roots out of the pot and plant something else in there, these started to sprout up.

Well I think that's my garden more or less summed up. I do have more pots containing some carrots (we had a good crop from the same brand last year), spring onions (again a lot of success previously), radish and beetroot that we haven't tried before. I will try and update the photographs in a month or so as things grow.