Alexander and I spent some time in the garden on Saturday, for the
first time in weeks it hasn’t been either raining or frosty. We
pottered around a bit, mostly playing with his little house and some
time in the potting shed.

Saturday Planting

In the potting shed we took the eight chilli seedlings and put them in
separate pots. Two went into a pot outside (the weakest two, I don’t
expect them to survive but thought that they ought to have some chance.
They are in a pot with some broad beans planted in it (although no sign
of the broad beans yet, the frost and snow has probably delayed them
coming up). Two of the others, including the biggest one, were put into
pots and then into a propagator in the potting shed. The weather
forecast is pretty mild so I hope that this will get them used to being
outside. The last four all went into three inch peat pots and back onto
the kitchen windowsill for a few more weeks.

Outside we also played with a rake and raked up last year’s onion bed,
which grew the onions well but only provided the slugs with a tasty
treat. Alexander was evry keen on planting seeds, so we scattered the
rest of the packet of onion seeds and also put some peas into the bed
as well as companion planting. Time will tell how well this combination
works (if at all).

We went indoors as it started to rain about 13:30, remembering this
time to cover up the sand pit so that there wouldn’t be the same beach
effect with sea for the little boat to float on…

Sunday Cutting

The weather held well on Sunday, even though it did threaten to rain
at times. Tracy and I spent most of the afternoon in the front garden.
Tracy was clearing some of the grass from the seed that blew over into
our borders at the end of last summer. The first border next to the
house (about 2 square metres) was cleared, covered with black material
and then bark chips.

Meanwhile I had a go at the hedge. We’ve got an unruly bit of thorny
hedge out the front. It has defied efforts to cut it down and it
remains a tangle of branches. I spent an hour cutting and lopping and
from outside you can’t see much of a difference, although from the
inside (where I was working from) you can see that a chunk of it has
been cut away. Much of the stuff that I cut through couldn’t be
disentangled from the mass, although I was trying to make it about a
third of its original height, so perhaps not a surprise that it took so
long. Despite wearing thick leather gardening gloves my hands have
several holes where the thorns got me.

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