After a turbulent July, August so far has been lovely. It makes it really feel like spring is so close you could touch it. The first half is looking to be mostly sunny with a smattering of rain, but it will still be cold. Too cold to start the growing season off early. As keen as it feels, nature has its own sense of timing and won’t be hurried so there is no reason for me to rush into anything just yet.
Having said that, there are plenty of things that need doing here before the new season arrives. It is a little like nesting before the baby comes. (Important note: there is no baby!) To prevent overwhelming myself, over the last couple of months I have just done what seemed to be the most urgent and squeezed tasks in around the wind and rain.
Now that we have a good run of good weather promised to us, I decided to create a list of all the things that need to be done now to get ready for the new season. It isn’t a big list, but I found myself overthinking things and decided to get them down on paper so I wouldn’t try to formulate the list in the middle of the night.
The most common task across the garden is to prepare the garden beds for the new season. The cover crops are starting to flower and need chopping down. There is plenty of time for them to break down before the beds are needed. Some of the beds just need to be enriched with compost and blood and bone etc as the old crops come out. This also means we need to hurry up and eat a load of things to empty the beds so they can be prepared for the new crops.
The flower garden needs the most specific attention. I want to move the Gaura out of the cut flower garden and into a bed that is still wildly overgrown, but there is plenty of time to sort that out. I also want to move the gladioli to the same wildly overgrown bed. I do love them, but they keep getting rust on their leaves. I’m not ready to give up on them completely but I just want to put them somewhere where their leaves will be hidden but the flowers will shine. The other thing is they have so many tiny bulbs that have multiplied over the years I suspect I’ll need to sieve the soil to get them all out.
I also need to prune my rosemary – it has gone all leggy. And while I have the pruners out I need to tidy up the blueberries. They are coming along really well with loads of new growth and plenty of buds, but it is really clear where the dead bits are, so they need to come out.
And I have a project with my strawberries. Hopefully this will be a success story, but at the moment it is just an idea and a collection of gathered supplies. I am yet to know if it is a good idea or not. I’m hoping it will be a good one as the cost of things these days is through the roof. I’ll let you know how it turns out (even if it turns out to be a bad idea – so you don’t need to try it out).
So, all in all there are only 18 things on my garden to do list. It doesn’t seem impossible but is suspect it will be one of those lists where more things get added as things get crossed off. But that is the nature of things at this time of year!
Come again soon – it feels so good to find the sun warming your back as you work.
Sarah the Gardener : o)
I’ve been tempted to get out and start sowing on the grounds that if the weeds can grow, the plants should be able to, but with next week’s cold snap coming, I think I’ll play it safe and stick to poking in a few more peas.
It is so tempting, but I know from experience winter hasn’t finished with us yet, and weeds are so much more resilient than our tender veggie crops! It will be time soon enough. : o)