Garden Update

Boy, what a long time of not posting again. Time just goes so fast, and there hasn't really been very much special going on since Easter. I suppose here are a few update photos from our gardening projects:

General tidying up - I asked Sean to give the ivy hedge a trim...personally, I thought he went a bit overboard as there was nothing left to see but woody bits! (It's recovering now and starting to look quite nice with lots of fresh light green - update photo to follow.)


Very little of our bulbs and gorms have been producing last year and this year again - we had a few tulips, one hyacinth and a couple of tete-a-tetes but nothing else. So when we prepared the bed for our vegetable project this year we dug down to have a look at the bulbs/gorms and most of them were gone or so eaten to bits that you can just see why they wouldn't go on living.


As a result, we decided to take a definite step to decimate the slug population in our garden which over the last years has been enormous. As we don't like chemicals, we resorted to nematodes which are tiny organisms that invade the slugs in the earth and parasitically cause them die. The creatures need to be watered into the moist soil with preferably several rainy days after, so we have only been able to do that recently as our April and early May was unusually dry and hot!

(No, I'm not watering the lawn on a rainy day! It's the nematodes in the water!!!)

At least some other things in the garden have been doing well and giving us pleasure:

Pulsatilla (alpine plant)

Corkscrew Hazel

Bleeding Heart

And on the veggie growing front there is some progress, too. I convinced Sean to a trip to a nearby gardening centre to buy soil and other bits for potting, some tomato and chilli plants, and also a "grownhouse" - a plastic covered shelf that acts like a mini greenhouse; and then I spent a weekend potting and Sean harvested some of our bamboo which is now drying in the shed to be used for staking and for holding up netting to keep the birds off the veg.