Front Garden Update

It feels like I haven't been out in the garden for ages.  This is largely because I haven't, as it has rained pretty much continually for what seems like months.  It's also been nasty and cold so things are growing very slowly.  Mum and Dad sent me some photos of their gardens recently (yes, they have multiple gardens!) and I couldn't believe how far ahead everything is down in sub-tropical Nottinghamshire. 

Here's an update from the frozen North.

In the front garden, we have - going clockwise from under the window - herbs, the salad bed, raspberries, potatoes in a bag, strawberries, a bed containing the gooseberry bush, King Rhubarb, some more raspberries and the blueberries, and the coldframe.

The herbs are parsley, mint, thyme and chive.  I've got basil, oregano and rosemary growing and waiting to go into the empty pots.  And, not that you can tell, I sowed spinach seeds in the raised bed some weeks ago!

Then there are the raspberries...planted this Autumn as the old ones, which fruited beautifully and in the case of the Autum Bliss until December, got mildew and had to be dug up.  I was very sad.  These ones are Glen Ample and seem to have got off to a slow start.

The potatoes in a bag are coming along better than the ones in the veg patch in the back garden, due to the front garden being south-facing.  Alastair has become the official potato-eather-upper and has been keeping them well banked up.

The strawberries, by contrast with the raspberries, have loved all the rain.  Fingers crossed we should have a good crop.

There are lots of little bundles of fruits like these just waiting to ripen (and hopefully we will get them before the birds do!).

The big raised bed has a mixture of fruit in it.  King Rhubarb, of course, and also the reluctant gooseberry, and the blueberries.

The reluctant gooseberry has never produced any fruit - actually I tell a lie, in 2010 he produced one gooseberry - so his future is highly uncertain.  I pruned him hard earlier this year and he's grown back beautifully but isn't yet in flower.  Watch this space!

The blueberries have got fruit on them - can't wait until they ripen.  The best thing about last Sunmer/Autumn was going outside before breakfast and picking blueberries to go with my bran flakes!

The coldframe is harbouring a real mixture - Mum and Dad's courgettes and some slug-nibbled caulifowers for them, plus some left-over tomatoes for a friend's plant sale, plus the two remaininng melons (three died), the geraniums and my courgettes which are enjoying a therapeutic stay in the warm after being planted out too early and being very traumatised.  They have come alomg very well - they are the ones in the second photo and they're catching up with the ones that have been in the cold-frame all along.  It just goes to show how much of a difference just one variable like temperature can make.

And finally, I couldn't finish without mentioning my dahlias...or rather the bleeding stumps of my poor dahlias!

We got home from doing the food shopping about about ten to ten on Friday night (we lead a very exciting life) and there were not one but two snails snacking on my dahlias!  Teetotal snails evidently, as they'd ignored the beer trap Alastair had installed for me.  Not entirely sure what I can do to protect my poor dahlias now - might try copper tape around the pot as this worked so well with the flowerpots earlier this year.  I'm not sure whether snails burrow deviously into the soil and hide like slugs do or not, but I'm pretty sure they can't abseil in like Dad said they could!