Digging, danger and fast things.

Digging, danger and fast things.

I don’t know if it is because I’m getting older or because I have so much to do, but time is marching away on me.  I’m working as fast as I can, with appropriate breaks so I don’t burst a foofoo valve, but we are nearly two thirds the way through the first month of spring!  But then spring is the busy season for a gardener.

I can proudly say I have now sown all of my seeds. I broke them up into small batches over the last few days and weeks so I wouldn’t get overwhelmed.  I have a pretty large garden to fill. The only ones that still need to be sown are the beans and corn.  I like to sow them directly in the ground when the risk of frost has passed so I don’t need to deal with them in seed trays and pots in the greenhouse and they don’t mind being planted direct.

Hold on – that’s not quite the truth – there are a stack of direct sow seeds that can go in now and are just a stack of seed packets with good intentions woven among them. I said in my last video I was going to do them by the end of the week – last week and completely forgot – it’s my peas, carrots, parsnips and radish – it shouldn’t take more than a jiffy to get them in – maybe tomorrow, if I remember.

It’s great waiting for the seedlings to germinate, but I feel like this is the calm before the storm as it won’t be long until they all will need transplanting out of the seed raising mix and expanding to take over the greenhouse!  The first lot of peppers and eggplants got transplanted into their own 5cm pots yesterday and the tomatoes don’t look too far behind.  It is at this point I regret sowing with a heavy hand, but the seeds are a good few seasons old, and this would be the last time I’d use them before ordering fresh ones so waste not want not and all that.  How was I to know they’d all come up.  I was expecting at least a few of them to be duds!  The gentle pace of seed sowing most likely won’t be replicated in the transplant stage.

I also got my potatoes in.  I like to traditionally sow them 100 days before Christmas.  The spuds I chose for Christmas this year only take 60 – 70 days instead of the ones that normally take 100 days, so the date is a little pointless, but I do like a bit of tradition. The bed ended up needing a bit of digging.  It somehow became lower at one end, so I needed to move soil from one end to the other to even it out, and then dug 8 trenches across the 1m x 4m garden bed to plant my spud deeply.  I know you’re supposed to mound up as they grow, but I’m a busy gardener and likely to miss the window of opportunity so I do my mounding up at planting time.  It’s usually fine.

I’ve also been working on another exciting project a long time in the planning.  It was supposed to be a Mother’s Day gift from back in May!  We’re almost there but I’m not ready to share it yet – I want a grand ‘DID-DAH’ moment for this one that took so long in coming to ‘fruition’.

And in the last of the garden update activities, I pruned my rosemary hedge around my rock garden.  It was a perfectly still, dry, blue-sky day and just the right conditions for pruning hedges.  You need to take your opportunities where you can in spring, the weather is so unpredictable, and it is supposed to pack up towards the end of the week.  It is a little wonky because I eyeballed it and hand cut it with hedge clippers.  But I figure once those little green shoots pop through they will disguise my handy work.

I recently watched a You Tube Video where a landscaper was explaining landscaping principles and she said, “there are three parts to every job – the preparation, the job and the clean-up.”  I have tried my best to adopt this advice in the garden and I feel so much more organised.  Although I did leave some tools out in the rain yesterday – but how was I to know it was going to rain – it wasn’t on the forecast!  Well anyway, my hedge pruning job is now a two-day job, I got everything prepared for the job, and I finished the pruning bit, but I may have run out of juice for the clean-up.  Tomorrow is another day!

It has also been a clumsy week – aside from aching muscles from the spud digging and rosemary pruning, I bashed up my thumb yesterday. It was a little stiff and I was worried I’d done more harm than good, but I have full movement today and an impressive scrape for my troubles.  I was pulling with all my might on a weed that wouldn’t come out of the ground until it decided it would – suddenly, sending my hand into a brick wall! Ouch!  But I didn’t go for a bandaid until after I’d finished weeding the section I was working on. I really should wear gloves.

But more importantly, I ended up at the doctors to get a tetanus shot. It wasn’t a bad injury – I just scraped the side of my head on a rusty spike thing I knew was there and was trying to avoid.  Instead of trying to avoid it, I should have just removed it, but hindsight is a beautiful thing. It wasn’t a bad scrape, but I rubbed it with my dirty hand to check for bleeding!  Then I remembered Tetanus and began to fret.  So out of an abundance of caution I spend an entire morning waiting with my non urgent situation so I could get my shot – which was out of date so just as well.  Gardens can be dangerous places so if your tetanus isn’t up to date, then I urge you to get it sorted.

And on that note – I’ll leave you in peace.  It has been a busy week and I expect next week will be more of the same.

Come again soon – life in my garden is never boring!

Sarah the Gardener  : o)