In the garden

Our garden isn’t very big.  It’s normally covered with toys, piles of mud, toys, piles of mud, toys, piles of mud and occasionally, chicken poop.

There hasn’t been much grass there for a couple of years.  What the kids don’t dig up/slide on/eat (depending on the age) gets pulled up by the chickens.  Mike’s been diligently working on that for the last month or so, and now we have the finest lawn we can ever remember having.  It’s like the courts at Wimbledon.  Except not quite.

A few weeks back my mother in law gave me a few pots and seed trays which made me very happy.  We had a couple of stacks of terracotta pots of differing sizes piled up safely out of reach of the kids – and where I couldn’t get to them either.  I asked Mike if he’d get them for me, which he gladly did and I had plans of making a feature of the old, “dangerous to use cement step”s going up to the main part of the garden.  They were closed off once Mike had built “safe steps” that weren’t so steep, weren’t so dangerous and had a handrail to hold onto.  The first time Mike had built the “safe steps” Sid missed his footing and fell down them.  He’d never fallen off the “dangerous to use cement steps”.  Murphy, your law sucks.

Anyway, I digress.

My plans were that I would use a few of the larger pots for growing different types of lettuce in, then the smaller pots would be home to tomato plants and flowers.  I wanted a lot of pots dotted about the bottom part of the garden with lots of pretty flowers growing in them.

All I had to do was wash the pots and get them ready.

Before I could do that Mike knocked them over.

And broke lots.

I was not happy.

Still, like the little soldier I’m not I made the most of what I had left.

Here is how my container garden has grown in the last month:

Here is my pot of strawberries.  Yes, more strawberries.  I told you before I was determined to have home-grown strawberries this year.  And they’re growing.  Can you see them?  To stop the plants and fruit from touching the soil and rotting I had bought some Mulch Mats.  I was expecting them to be more than they were which was ridiculously overpriced black cardboard.  In future I shall go to the cheapo store and get some cheap black cardboard from the kiddy art aisle.  £4.00 for ten squares of card just doesn’t seem worth it to me. 

Here are some more pots on the “dangerous to use cement steps”.  Some have flowers, some have tomatoes and three have lettuce.  I should have had more pots to show you but Mike knocked them over.  And broke lots.  

And here is a better view of one of the lettuce pots.  I started off some different types of cut-and-come-again lettuce in small pots, including Red Salad Bowl, Mizuna, Rocket, and Lamb’s Lettuce.  Once they’d grown a little I transferred them into the terracotta pots.  Cut the larger leaves as they grow and allow the smaller ones to grow and, together with successional sowing of new seeds you can have a regular supply throughout the summer.  I do need more than three pots for all of us to have enough to eat over the summer months.  But as we know I can’t.
Because Mike knocked them over.

And broke lots. 

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