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evaelisabethMom and I had a lovely day in the garden yesterday, Kate and Brian were off to ice skate in Dublin but I will let him tell that story.
We were pruning fools, we got all the soft fruit done, each one gets treated a little differently so we had our smart book on the topic out there with us. We also gave the apple trees their first haircut and they are all looking smart. Our Victoria Plum was a big big mess and got ruthlessly cut back till there is very little left of the poor tree. No plums for us this year but we hope that next year it will come back stronger and happier than it has been in years. We discovered a vertical split in the crab apple and hope very much that it will survive, the poor thing was severely stressed by the building, maybe next week we will do some heavy duty pruning on it but that requires my lovely hubby to get up on a ladder.
We also did all the roses which are all doing well and moved the three that needed to be shifted. In the process we inspected our herb garden and found that pretty much everything we expected to survive did. This year we will hopefully have a more organized and easy time of it. The vast majority of the beds are in so we can plant and sow when the time is right.
Our new 12'x24' polytunnel arrived last week and we are very happy campers, it will make a lot of difference to our garden this year. The next priority is putting three raised beds into it, two narrow ones running down the sides for tomatoes and cucumbers that will be trained up the walls, the third bed will be about 1m wide and run part of the way down the middle. There will be room for a potting bench and a table with a couple of chairs. We looked into getting fresh pressure treated lumber to build them but the cost was almost €300 which is crazy, so we are going to see if we can get another load of the used scaffolding which will be half the price if a tad heavy to work with :-) We are ending up with more room than we were expecting because our plans were for a 3mx6m polytunnel and we ended up with a 12'x24' which turns out quite a bit bigger. Luckily we discovered this before purchasing wood to build the beds.
It was great getting out in the fresh air, the weather cooperated and we discovered that our snowdrops are bursting through the ground, even some tulips think its spring. The Witchhazel is blooming with it's lovely little yellow flowers and we hope very much we don't get any more -10C cold snaps. It was a good day, I'm still buzzing with all that lovely green energy.
We were pruning fools, we got all the soft fruit done, each one gets treated a little differently so we had our smart book on the topic out there with us. We also gave the apple trees their first haircut and they are all looking smart. Our Victoria Plum was a big big mess and got ruthlessly cut back till there is very little left of the poor tree. No plums for us this year but we hope that next year it will come back stronger and happier than it has been in years. We discovered a vertical split in the crab apple and hope very much that it will survive, the poor thing was severely stressed by the building, maybe next week we will do some heavy duty pruning on it but that requires my lovely hubby to get up on a ladder.
We also did all the roses which are all doing well and moved the three that needed to be shifted. In the process we inspected our herb garden and found that pretty much everything we expected to survive did. This year we will hopefully have a more organized and easy time of it. The vast majority of the beds are in so we can plant and sow when the time is right.
Our new 12'x24' polytunnel arrived last week and we are very happy campers, it will make a lot of difference to our garden this year. The next priority is putting three raised beds into it, two narrow ones running down the sides for tomatoes and cucumbers that will be trained up the walls, the third bed will be about 1m wide and run part of the way down the middle. There will be room for a potting bench and a table with a couple of chairs. We looked into getting fresh pressure treated lumber to build them but the cost was almost €300 which is crazy, so we are going to see if we can get another load of the used scaffolding which will be half the price if a tad heavy to work with :-) We are ending up with more room than we were expecting because our plans were for a 3mx6m polytunnel and we ended up with a 12'x24' which turns out quite a bit bigger. Luckily we discovered this before purchasing wood to build the beds.
It was great getting out in the fresh air, the weather cooperated and we discovered that our snowdrops are bursting through the ground, even some tulips think its spring. The Witchhazel is blooming with it's lovely little yellow flowers and we hope very much we don't get any more -10C cold snaps. It was a good day, I'm still buzzing with all that lovely green energy.