This week has seen some work on the lawns.

Earlier in the week, the forecast was suggesting that the hot weather would break, so we got some spring treatment onto both lawns and as the weather remained stubbornly dry had to get the sprinkler going a couple of times to start watering it in.  The first of the promised rain finally arrived, accompanied by thunder, overnight.

Lawns are very unrewarding bits of garden to care for, they are swiftly infested by weeds and moss, the grass gets long and ungainly too quickly, or doesn’t seem to grow at all and the lawnmower seems to go blunt at the drop of a hat.  However, there is no doubt that a mowed lawn (with stripes in deference to my love of cricket outfields and cross-hatched fairways) really does help to make a garden look more cared for.

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.

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One of the results of our trip to France, and the quantities of fresh asparagus that we consumed was the decision that we are going to start a bed at home.

After a couple of exploratory trips to local garden centres, we ended up getting some crowns, which were not the variety that we’d initially wanted.  We will have to see how “Baacklim” works out.  It is apparently a “mid to late season male variety with consistent yields of large, smooth spears with well closed tips. It has good disease resistance.” (Unwins website).

Lynn started digging the bed yesterday evening and I got it finished and planted up today.  This is an investment for the future.

Also this week we bought a batch of root training pots for the leeks and I had a merry session in the shed, potting on the leeks into the new root trainers as well as planting some additional sweet peas.

Gardening in the sunshine while Radio 4 burbles on in the background has to be some sort of epitome of middle England.

I have always been keen on growing seedlings in pots or cells wherever possible, not only does this give more control – light and temperature can be varied – but it is a good way of saving the embarrassment of weeding out the precious new plants.  Having done this once with Lynn’s anemones I’m anxious not to repeat the error.

Red cabbages – Kalibos / Red onions – Red Baron

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Once back at home the focus was on our home beds, Lynn got new sowings of carrots and parsnips in, as well as dong a “show sowing” of carrots in one of the old re-cycling bins.  We tidied up the south-facing bed and weeded the neighbouring flower border, in which the new narcissus and old tulips look really good following last autumn’s clear up.

I pricked out and potted on the sweet corn and butternut squash and learnt a valuable lesson about sweet corn.  The plans are much less robust than they appear and I managed to snap half a dozen of them as I tipped the first batch out of the seed tray.  I got all the rest out safely by being very careful, but in future, these will be sown into a pot big enough to give decent root development and then be planted out once they are quite substantial.

Mowing the lawns added a veneer of respectability to the garden more widely.

We have been growing vegetables in the garden for over 20 years and have developed a manageable set of plots within the confines of our relatively modest garden.  These include three 6’ by 4’ raised beds at the rear of the garden, a rhubarb patch and a south facing border with a blackcurrant and blackberry in it that we also used for sun-loving vegetables and salad crops.  The photo below taken last winter shows it looking very peaceful.

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