Garden Diaries 3

Garden phase 1 complete

Finally I have finished the weeding stage of the garden makeover. Or at least it is for now. There are a few plants that we were unsure of so we are waiting until they flower to decided if they will stay or go.

The large grassy plant in the far corner of this bed was almost taking over this entire flower bed.

We are still not sure if we are going to keep this plant or not. My best friend isn’t too keen on it, she thinks it’s ugly.

I don’t hate it. So to compromise we decided that a good haircut is good for now and then we will see how it looks as the garden takes on its new look.

There are also a lot of bluebells in this bed. This bed will be the bluebell bed for the time being.

Bluebells and pink things

There are quite a lot of bluebells and pink flowers in the garden. We have no idea what the pink things are called but it turns out they are responsible for all of that woody stuff I pulled out a few weeks ago. Once they have flowered we will see how they look and we will decided if they will stay or not.

The bluebells were planted intentionally before I moved in here but they seem to have spread around a lot and taken over. We kept a few of them and removed a few others

A pot of spuds

One of the things I am keen on growing is potatoes. My brother has grown a few potatoes and he was giving me some tips. He usually grows them in a potato grow bag. I was tempted to buy a couple of those but I wanted to use things we already have as much as possible.

There was a large unused blue pot in the corner of the garden. I thought it would make a nice home for my spuds. It’s previous job was just to store smaller pots.

You can buy seed potatoes in garden centres, Lidl also has some in stock at the moment but I love an experiment so I just took a few large potatoes with eyes and let them go sprouty.

You can cut the potatoes into pieces once they have sprouted, each piece needs at least 2 eyes. I had 3 potatoes and 2 were able to be cut in half before being planted.

I forgot to take photos of the seed potatoes before I planted them. As the potatoes grow, they start to show up above the soil line.

Once this happens you add more soil and they keep growing.

I chose this pot because it is so deep. It will allow me to keep adding soil so I can hopefully grow so beefy spuds.

At the moment it is about a third full. I placed the seed potatoes around the edges. My brother recommended this for their placement.

Germination station

Unfortunately all of my previous seed babies went mouldy. I think part of the issue was lack of air. I read a few different methods online and they used wet paper towel in small bowls covered with cling film. This method might work well in warmer climates. But here in damp cold Ireland I think the seeds need to be open. I needed to toss those poor seeds in the bin and start again.

For round 2 of the germination station I decided to sow the seeds directly in soil rathe that wet paper towel. I used compost in small seed trays and followed the instructions on depth and spacing. 2 of the trays are hanging out in the shed and 3 are in the germination station.

The seed packets are only there so I could remember what was sown where. I used small plastic labels to mark each section before putting them in the germination station.

The 2 trays in the shed contain Kale and leeks. I’m looking forward to seeing them progress into seedlings.

First things in the ground

After doing a lot of reading I decided to sow the spinach seeds directly into the flower beds. Spinach can bolt when it it transplanted so to try and combat this it was sown direct. We had 2 different types of Spinach, perpetual spinach and regular spinach. Im not exactly sure what the difference is between these 2 types of spinach but the seeds were quite different. I’m looking forward to eating each of them all the same.

I wanted to give them the best possible start in life so rather than sowing them into the soil, I put a layer of compost on top of the soil before the seeds and then a light layer over them.

This little white Buddha statue marks the spinach border. Hopefully he will offer a little luck for them growing up big and strong.

Feeding our garden friends

The last thing I did before calling it a day was to refill the bird bath and bird feeder.

I bought this bird feeder a few years ago but I wasn’t very good at keeping it filled. I’ve been making it a bit higher of a priority to keep it full of seed. I really like watching the birds come and go. There are a lot of robins around at the moment. Every time I go out to the garden to work they come along to watch.

They are very confident birds they don’t seem to have any issue coming close to me when I’m out there. As soon as the bird feeder is full they go straight to it. I love watching them come and go. Tell me you’re getting older without telling me you’re getting older!

A step closer

I’m really happy with how the garden is coming along. It is really starting to take shape now. Having the first few seeds in the ground is very exciting. I am really looking forward to having my first home grown salad. You can read more about this Garden makeover here.