The last week or so has seen quite a surge of effort in, and for, the garden.

We have started sowing extra flowers for the allotment and garden, including marigolds, asters and dahlias from collected seed.  I’ve had no joy trying to store dahlia tubers, so it will be interesting to see if the seeds yield anything useful.

I started work on a new set of boarding to raise the little bed that we use for roses.  This is one of those “round to it” jobs as the timber for this was part of my birthday present back in January.  This only took a couple of sessions and a helpful by-product was that I also cracked on with weeding the gravel path.

Lynn has also made a start on tidying up the front garden, which always gets rather more neglected tan the back – no food in it for one thing.

We also had the spring bonfire to get some ash on this year’s cabbage bed.  The old wood from the rose bed got a good fire going and it became a job of quickly cutting things back to make best use of the fire, which soon devoured the initial pile of pruning material that we had accumulated.

The ease of using the root training pots for the leeks led to the purchase of some more along with gravel trays and tray-sized capillary mats to help caring for seedlings.

The root training pots came into fairly immediate use as we potted on the sweet peas in them.

We have also cracked on with potting-on the delicate plants, peppers, gherkins, tomatoes and aubergines.  We now have window sills full of various sorts of plants and plenty hardening off on the patio.  We have lots of marigolds and a few dahlias from the saved seed, but no signs of any asters yet.