A Sunny Saturday

A beautiful sunny day with forsythia and daffodils in full flower, the first dwarf tulips appearing and some muscaria and hyacinths

As well as a lot of hours at the allotment, we've been pottering about in the garden this week, moving bricks and slabs.The re-design is going well. Brick dividers to mark 'flower' and 'veg' zones are now in place and the plants moved last year starting to show signs of life.

I'm particularly pleased to see these two forsythias coming into flower. Both were split from the old one in the middle of the garden. This one is intended to hide the back fence..

...and I hope this one will hide the compost bin in a year or so.

Sowing time

In last week's sunshine we got lots of seed set down at the allotment - peas, broad beans, carrots and beetroot under plastic. This week, which isn't so pleasant, I've concentrated on the garden - that way I can go back inside for coffee when I get too cold :)

I dug over one of the wedges of my veg patch with the intent of sowing early peas there.

On the left are clumps of American land cress and on the right, winter onions, with flowers here and there among them.

I had some homegrown seed in a pot clearly marked as peas but hubby doesn't believe the label so won't set them at the allotment. They look particularly odd in the photo as they've been soaked then rolled in chilli powder to deter mice! Anyway I'm hoping they grow nicely and I soon have peas for dinner!

Fingers crossed.

Surprise discovery

I've been continuing with my garden redesign which involves adding new paths.













While trying to level the ground before laying out the bricks I made a surprise discovery ....



....potatoes! A couple of years ago a root of them self-set by the compost bins. Although we tried to lift them, we always seem to miss one small potato and they continue to grow.

Inspiration

 We've been out for another trip to Chatsworth - round their enormous kitchen garden - and I've come back with more ideas I can use here.
This very dark leaved aubergine would, I'm sure, work in a mixed flower and veg bed.

I don't have a shed in a position where I could grow currants up the side of it - but I'm going to have a go on the fence.

This is definitely the look I want to achieve in my pretty but productive section. So far this year, the slugs and snails are working against me as all the lettuce has been eaten!

Peonies among the vegetables? Well, why not.

More redesigning and loads of free bricks

With my plans for re-structuring the garden, we'd expected to have to buy more slabs or bricks - so when 'lots of bricks' were offered on Freecycle, we asked for them. There were rather a lot!

And some nice shaped cobbles for edging or circular features.

The task then was to decide how best to use them - and to clear them from the patio. This is step 1 - a small paved area by the repositioned bench. It's not quite finished off because a rhubarb root is in the way and I don't want to move it at this time of year.

 We now need to make a path through the flowers to the lawn instead of walking through and crushing them.

Step 2 - finding out how many bricks will be needed to replace the path to the greenhouse which was made of old broken slabs.

checking the width of the new path

Step 3 - and at last the fundamental design of the new garden falling in to place - I'm using some of the remainder of the bricks to mark out two arcs either side of the main path. Inside the arcs will be small annual flowers and plots for growing veg seedlings. Outside are larger or perennial plants -on one side foxgloves and a wigwam of mangetout peas, and on the other the rhubarb.