What jobs are we doing in the Garden today 2015

Well, my Green H9use is still in a state of disarray, Charlie, so all the trays have clear plastic top covers and are in my South facing well lit rear bedroom. I've been doing that for many years and it works perfectly......also in the same room are two large heated propagators containing my newly sown Toms. I just do a two day check on them to ensure that the compost is still moist and then as they appear and put out true leaves I take them down to the Green House, [which has been cleaned out], and pot them on. As each variety has it's own length of time to appear above the compost I don't have a mad rush to do them all at once. The Green House is unheated, by the time the new seedlings are in they quickly harden off and I can't remember any losses over the years.

 

Well, about 50% of the trays have cell trays in them so I find it easy to take them out as plugs and then pot on..........nothing to hard or laborious

 

Hi Martin, don't worry, it happens to us all. I grow a fair few Clematis and the path to getting to know how to grow them successfully in the early years is littered with casualties.

 

Mrs Shiney will be working on the pots in our 'plant sale' areas. They need to be tidied up, cleared of leaves, de-mossed, dead ones thrown away etc. Then she will do a similar thing the plants in the greenhouse so that she can move them to the plant sale areas (when she's made room for them). This is likely to be a few days solid work so will take a good couple of weeks as there are lots of other things to do as well

She's been transplanting seedlings into 3.5" pots and they're now littering our windowsills. Littering is the correct word for it as we use cat litter trays for them We've found that they are the best thing fir the pots as they are much deeper than plant trays and we have less accidents with them. The best/cheapest that we can get around here are the square brown ones from Pets at Home. They hold 12 pots and cost £2.99 (I'm off to get more today).



I did some more edging of the lawns and then composted the new flower bed.

Earlier on this year we had the last of the Leylandii (hedge) removed from the front garden and the removal of all 22 of them has given us a bed that's 55ft long

Having had Leylandii there for almost 40 years the soil was completely denuded of nutrients. So we went to one of the local farms that has horses and filled 40 x 70 litre compost bags with horse manure and dug it in. I used the last of our home made compost in part of the bed and, last week, did a deal with my neighbour.

All his beds are covered in plastic and then covered with wood chippings. He just has trees and shrubs growing through it. So he doesn't have any use for his compost. I was having an enormous bonfire last week and I saw he had loads of conifer branches and other woody prunings in a pile 5ft high. I offered to burn them on my bonfire and he said I could have his compost heap.

So, yesterday, we moved about a ton of compost into the new bed and have started digging it in. There's still about another half ton to bring round but that shall go on some of the beds that I didn't compost in the autumn. Lots of compost and horse poo should help the plants .





My back hurts!!