Seedlings!

A busy day today so no time to garden but all of a sudden we have seedlings!  The tomatoes and sweetcorn have appeared and look very cheerful


Maybe I am going to have a garden this year :)

First attempt at mulch

I have been saving cardboard and today we put big sheets of card down on the right veg bed and tipped a bag of compost from the recycling centre on the top of it (I pulled up the weeds I could see first).  It is nowhere near enough but it looks good.  I moved the bench to its new home and hid a few piles of slabs under it.


I'm going to need a lot more card and a lot more compost to cover all of the beds.

Starting the real work

It's a dry day so I started lifting the slabs to form new vegetable beds.  It has been raining this week so the ground was wet and my boots and gloves were a real mess by the time I came in.  I got about 3/4 of the slabs up today, I'll need to move some furniture around to get at the rest.
I'm a bit worried about the ground beneath the slabs.  I hadn't really thought about it but of course the ground was prepared for paving so there is a grey sand on the earth.  I'm not sure what it is, cement perhaps?  anyway, I probably don't want to plant in it.  
Copious googling is not telling me what to do so I'm going to have to make it up as I go along.  I know that moss and dandelions can grow in it but I don't eat them!


I also met one of our garden residents:

This little frog is very cute in real life but manages to make me shriek every time he surprises me.

planting

I planted my tomato and sweetcorn seeds tonight and put them on a warm windowsill.  In a fit of pessimissim I planted all of the tomato seeds (about 25 of them) and 6 sweetcorn seeds.  


I'm now thinking that if even half of those tomato seeds work out I'm going to have twice as many tomato plants as last year.  Everyone may end up getting tomato plants as gifts.

the plan!

I have been spending my evenings planning my garden planting.  Using my Christmas books and my list of veg that I like I'm starting to make a drawing of what will go where.

To see where the sun would shine at different times of the year I used  http://sketchup.google.com/ to draw the garden and the house (fairly roughly, it was raining so I didn't go outside to measure) and followed the instructions here: http://www.builditsolar.com/References/SketchUp/SketchUpEx.htm to see where there would be the most sunshine for sun hungry plants.  This was probably a bit much but it let me pretend to garden on a dark, wet night.

In principal I'm going to plant in 1m squares but I'll fill in gaps as I go, also, I haven't thought about what will grow when, I'll just write down what happens for next year.

The plan has a page all to its self here:  The Plan

January - Planning

I have a large patio at the end of my garden that seems to get the sun almost all the time during the summer so I think I'll lift slabs from each side of it to make room for veg.

There is already a cherry tree at the top of the patio which has been there for about 2 years, if gave us 5 cherries last year so whatever I do I don't want to damage it.

Also at the top of the garden I have tree stumps for two holly trees which were removed in the autumn and an apple tree which died and was removed with the holly trees.  I know the holly trees have horrible fibrous roots which I'll have to remove if I want to plant there.

I've made a list of what I want to grow / eat next year:

New		Already have
artichoke		blackberries
asparagus		blueberries
brocolli		cherries
carrot		strawberries
cauliflower
celeriac
garlic
kiwi
leek
lettuce
onion
peas
potato
rubarb
squash
sunflower
swede
tomato

Tomorrow I'll have a think about where I will put them all.