Focus
A garden diary 11/04/11
Follow the trials and tribulations of an enthusiastic vegetable grower as he combats slugs, blight, bad weather, blackspot and general lack of know-how...
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Greetings from the summerhouse. I love spring, when everything bursts into life.
Actually this first instalment isn’t coming from the summerhouse – I don’t have one,
yet – but from the g
reenhouse.
Having cleared it out recently after several panes were smashed by somewhat careless tree ‘surgeons’, I thought I'd set up a garden recliner in here to see if it makes a warm, relaxing spot for catching up with reading the new edition of The Guide, listening to some horticultural advice on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time, or simply enjoying a snooze.
Lying here, savouring the evening sun and sustained by a mug of tea and homemade
cherry cake, with the birds twittering and surrounded by trays and pots of seeds
bursting into life, it’s hard not to feel the calming, nourishing effects of garden
life washing your soul and 
rinsing your spirits.
Before you think I’m drifting a little too far into lala land, let’s get back to business. What has been achieved in my slice of Motspur Park land today?
As a trial-and-error vegetable grower, I'm hoping for better things from the veggie
plot this year. Now some ash trees have been chopped it will certainly get more sunlight,
and a trip to the stables beyond the Sir Joseph Hood playing fields today produced
the first of – hopefully – many regular supplies of manure. This has been added to
the black plastic composters, to speed the process and enrich what will eventually
come out the bottom of them.
In the raised beds I made a year or two ago (from marine ply, salvaged from the old garage roof – it doesn’t rot) I’ve got lettuce and cabbages on the go.
Last year was a good one for lettuce. There's nothing to beat sitting outdoors eating a tasty meal with salad freshly picked a few minutes earlier. But this year I’m being more adventurous, so as well as tomatoes and lettuce and runner beans, I hope to grow carrots, leeks, perpetual spinach and… oh, better wait and see what space is left.
But the garden also needs a bit of colour, so as well as some bedding plants I’ve prepared some hanging baskets, using horsehair matting recovered from an old mattress that I broke up and took to the dump. It makes a perfect covering to hide the black plastic (a binbag) liner.
Now, time to prepare the ground ready for more planting…
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