Rain Stops Play - Again

After a few days off I got back outside yesterday. Time to dig in the cow muck that I had liberally covered the veggie patch in last year. And then I decided that the layout of the beds was wrong. Two of them were too long and narrow, going from the wall down to the lawn to be. So now I have rearranged them all. Hopefully the beds are now large enough to be useful and small enough for me to be able to dig and plant them without having to stomp on them.

I tried to get Paul to saw up some more pallets to put in the pathways I had dug out but I am going to have to wait. He has taken the skin off his hand between thumb and forefinger when he did the lawn raking last week and decided this was a good excuse...

The one thing the sleet and rain has done is settle the soil in the fruit-tree-bed-to-be. This has shown that I was premature in my green highlighting. There is a definite slope down towards the wall so I need to add more to get it level. I made a start today. One barrow load done but the soil was too claggy. I decided just to get the weeds out of the remaining topsoil pile, but after half an hour it started to rain again :(

So we had a trip out to Homebase this afternoon - 20% off gardening section. And a mental list of all the things we need to make Geoff Hamilton cloches. We already have wood (left over from extension), water pipe (left over bits provided by Alan last year) to make the hoops, and the winter fleece I bought from Aldi's last year as the covering. So now we have angle brackets, screws, wood preserver, wood glue and dowel. Now I just need a handyman :)

I also bought two bundles of 7 ft bamboo canes, some bean/pea netting and some bedding plants. We had thought at first that 8 ft bamboo canes wouldn't fit into Paul's car but this was disproved when the 7 ft canes fitted in with room to spare. So we went back in...

And I also decided to buy two each of their aluminium troughs and deep planters, which had been already been reduced to half price before the extra 20% off, to replace my terracotta pots have not survived this winter.

To do list:

add more topsoil to fruit-tree-bed-to-be

plant potatoes

plant remaining summer flowering bulbs/bedding

start sowing veggie seeds (hopefully under my new home-made cloches)