I set this weekend aside in the calendar for preparing the new bed and
getting seeds on the go for it.

In all I'm a little behind at the end of the weekend, but apart from
that relaxed well worked ache, feeling very satisfied.

The planting of some rooted sleeping perenials sourced from gaden
centres, woolworths sale etc went well, but having seen the weather
forecast, I decided to pot them up in my unheated conservatory. Once the
milder weather comes back, I'll move them to the greenhouse before
planting them out.

Seeds went into pots and trays somewhat more slowly than normal since I
wanted to make sure I didn't have the over-germinated and under-thinned
fiasco that I presided over a couple of years ago when the sudden onset
of SWMBO needing a lot more attention due to pregnancy started to affect
my ability to spend time gardening and I ended up trying to seperate and
plant out foot high Dahlias from seed trays.

I also started to prepare the bed.

This is a new bed and that side of the garden has never really been
planted up. I was thinking about it a couple of years ago and got as far
as a winter mulch with shredded Leylandii over about 1/3 of the bed area
and then I put planters on top, some of the pernnial weeds broke through
anyway and the strawberry planter put out lots of plantlings that I left
as they were thinking that I'd move them to a dedicated area when the
time came.

In spite of the chilly weather I got on since the ground was reasonably
dry for the first time since late summer.

First stop on Saturday was the local stables (I'd gone to get the well
rotted manure last week, but they'd had a gravel delivery and the car
couldn't get to the heap). I filled 10 rubble bags and left happy. Some
friends came around and looked at the plans and Chris asked what I was
planning to do with the turf I'd be taking up since he has a small
section that the dog has destroyed. There went a little more time since
the turf I was taking up was actually in good nick so I took the time to
remove it carefully.

Then I started to dig over. With a week of frosts forecast, I really set
in since the more I got dug over, the more broken ground would be there
for the frosts to break some more for me. I tipped on the manure and dug
it in... then I tipped on more manure and dug it in. All the time the
lumps got smaller and the ground became more like soil. I'm on clay. The
first forkfull comes up in one red/grey lump usually and this side of
the garden has never been cultivated. 100 square feet have eaten all of
the manure and could probably do with more.

I saw very few worms in the first half of the bed. When I started to hit
the mulched section, I had to rescue the some of the strawberry plants
which meant I had to prepare the bed for them to go in. I had a couple
of bags of home-made compost (a bit woody, but they seem happy in wood
mulch so I'm not going to argue) so I dug that into the bit where the
compost bin used to be which will be behind a screen of the Bay when it
gets a bit bigger and a couple of other shrubs (to be decided on). I
deided that there was nothing I could do about their possible demise
from the weather and shock at being moved so I put 30 of them in the new
bed, put 5 into pots in the greenhouse and brought a couple in. I
mulched the new bed to try to protect them from frost and started
digging that section. Lots of worms there and the digging was much
easier. Much of the earth is black and full of small bits of wood even
on a deep dig so patience has been a virtue. Even so, I added more
manure and mixed it in.

I expect the worms will be migrating up the bed over the next few weeks
and I only got 1/3 of the area dug, since there isn't a huge amount of
urgency to get the bed ready, I spent a lot of time making sure that
there wasn't even a scrap of dock or dandelion root left in the bit I
was doing.

I rehomed the Crocosmia patch that was there to the front driveway where
there's a 1 foot wide 'border' with about 4 inches of 'soil' that we've
filled with spring bulbs in the main. If they survive being rehomed at
this time of year, they'll have a more difficult time taking over the
world.

As I've been planting the seeds, I've been taking note of the timetables
on the plants and note that I may get a small amount of flowering this
year on some of them since I'm planting early so I'm fairly glad that
lots of them came with free sets of annual seeds. They'll be going in
and plugging the coulour gaps this summer.

Warwick-- next post 5 minutes