hot on the heels of my last post about a wet weekend, we get a Bank Holiday Monday where not only did it pour doen, but it was so so cold as well. And at the end of May as well.

But nothing that a bit of retail theray couldn’t improve, and so a couple of hours in the garden centre (with two coffee stops to warm the cockles), and about £150 later, we have a car full of plants.

Of course it is far too wet to think about planting them, but they look good placed strategically around the beds. Perhaps we will get to them later in the week.

Well it certainly rained this weekend, and whilst the garden generally and the grass in partcular has benefited, it meant that nothing got done outside. Plans for a weekend of progress, and a BBQ or two were hastily shelved but not in time to save the BBQ from a soaking.

And now, after the unseasonably hot spell, everything is really starting to take off, so the lawn needs mowing, our miniature hedges need clipping back into shape, and the beds need weeding.

All the blossom has been blasted from the trees by the rain and everything looks a soggy mess, just crying out for some attention.

I am ashamed to say that the majority of our vegetable seeds remain unsown this year, for no other reason than lack of time. Or rather that the available time we have is sucked up in other ventures.

And whilst we have some lettuce sown, that remains about the sum total, the balance waiting and rattling about in their unopened seed packets.

On the agenda for the coming weekend is the planting of as many seeds as we possibly can, including sweetcorn, chilli peppers, more lettuce (for a successional crop), and dwarf beans. Progress report to follow!

I love compost.

I love the freeness of it.

I love the wholeness of the process.

I love that you can put waste in the top and get out a useful, productive, product at the bottom.

And now I have emptied the last of last years fully decomposed compost and bagged it ready to go on the various beds, and turned what is left, ready to start the cycle all over again.

What could be more lovely than that?

Our tulips, so proudly planted out by our eldest, that I have previously talked about, have been reduced somewhat in stature, by her younger brother. This is his first real season of realizing he can pick flowers, and does not need to simply look at them, or caress their petals in the slightly clumsy way he did last year, at the age of just about one. 

So, when he saw another young lad, old enough to know that some flowers (weeds) are acceptable picking fodder, who was visiting, pick a dandelion and dutifully present it to his mother, ours of course had to make a grab for something bigger and better than a dandelion to present to his mum.

And so the bright red tulips are now lacking more of their number, and we have a rather mangled tulip in a glass of water on the patio table.

So you may think we are gluttons for punishment, but it seems entirely natural that children want to garden. Or at least pull up earthworms to relocate to the compost heap or go ‘YUK’ and ‘EARGH’ at earwigs scurrying around after their peace is shattered as the pebble they were resting under is suddenly displaced by inquisitive fingers.

Anyway. we have tried to do easy kids gardening before (sunflowers, radishes, that sort of thing) all with little success, and lots of lost interest after the shoots have not appeared in the first few hours. Partly this is because of lack of water, or too much water, in equal measures (with anything involving kids and water usually ending in some sort of disaster).

So this year we have implemented a simple raised bed arrangement, with the help of a sandpit kit, and a lot of well rotted compost. So far this has been supplemented with raddish, lettuce and possibly dwarf bean seeds, and liberal amounts of water. Well lots of water straight after they were all planted, but not much since. This was a few days ago and so far, I don’t think the seeds have been dug up for random progress checks, but I suspect we won’t know until they start to sprout. Will keep you updated on progress, but now that the kids are in bed, must go and apply water liberally, to give them at least a fighting chance.

The herb garden has long been an important part of the English kitchen garden although today with the ready availability of dried herbs and fresh packet herbs from many supermarkets actually growing a herb garden is on the wane.

An easy and attractive solution, particularly for smaller gardens is to grow your herbs in pots. This way they have both a useful culinary purpose but also can have a large visual effect within your garden.

In the past we have grown a small bed, primarily just filled with herds and other culinary plants, but these have now become rather old and woody, or have died off altogether. So this year we are going back to planting our herbs in small terracotta pots and making a display on the patio just outside the back door to the kitchen.

Because we will use most of these herbs in the kitchen, we have restocked with established plants to avoid the need to wait for them to grow from seed. They still need to grow into their pots but this should happen over the course of the next few months

About the end of last year, we were given a present of a small metal bucket, complete with a number of tulip bulbs, and a small bag of compost. I can’t now remember how many bulbs but it would have been eight or ten, certainly no more as the bucket was only of modest size.

These bulbs were dutifully planted out by our then five year old, and lo and behold we now have a bucket of bright red tulips. They took a little while to actually flower and at one point I feared the slugs had got to them (perhaps that is where the missing bulbs ended up), but now there is satisfactory showing. Whilst the bucket is not the most beautiful thing in the world, if you see something similar in the shops come autumn time, this is not a bad present, particularly for children.

At the moment, we have a couple of what must be self seeded bluebell plants gracing one of our borders. In fact, the particular border is one that we have never really tried to do anything with, as it has seemingly been used as a general stone depository in the past, a place where all previous inhabitants have dumped any and every stone and small rock they came across whilst gardening. As such is even more infertile than the rest of our generally stony back garden. In some ways this makes their appearance even more welcome and provides an, albeit small, impetus to think about what we might do with this edge of the garden.

Lawns. Destined to drive many to distraction, a lawn can become a life long obsession, often disappointing its owners as when it should be at its peak it is browned off, literally by lack of rain, or turns from a lush and verdant grass to soggy moss.

One of the keys to a good lawn, like with so many other things to do with gardening, is the soil underneath the turf. Ideally this should be well draining and not too compacted, free from too many stones or tree roots, and neither too shady, nor too exposed.

In reality, most gardeners have to put up with what they get unless you’re prepared to dig up large swathes of your garden and replace top foot or so of soil with a new topsoil mix and then new turf and top.

This year our lawn has greened up nicely, but unfortunately most of that green is down to a thick bed of moss that will need to be treated and removed to allow new grass to grow. And although April onwards is the ideal time of year to start putting down lawn feed and moss killer, it does need to be applied when rain is imminent, and of course, the weather is set fair for the next few days. So it looks like it is on with other jobs until the weather turns.