Behold, there has been Gardening Done

Not much, admittedly, but some.

Mangetouts, beans and half the chard has been planted out, with the salad, peas and beetroot still to come. That will leave me filling a few gaps to replace the things that have totally failed so far this year. It does seem to have been a tricky spring for lots of gardeners, not just me (although I can’t really blame the weather, having simply failed to do any meaningful gardening for the past couple of months).

Now that the weather and the soil is warming up a bit I’m actually trying something I haven’t attempted for ages: planting stuff direct into the soil, rather than raising everything in modules first. Back in the days when I first started gardening up here, I quickly gave that up as a waste of time as very little ever came up and what did was promptly eaten by the slugs. But that was when I was young and keen and trying to get everything going in March. Now that I’ve reached the ‘help, how is it May already?’ stage of my gardening career I might just have left it late enough that the seeds will germinate on their own, although that still leaves those bastards the slugs

Of course, leaving it to May to get started does give things less time to grow, so there’s a danger I’ll end up with puny undersized vegetables like, say, leeks the size of spring onions.

Behold my mighty leek harvest. Baby leeks are a thing, right? pic.twitter.com/cpjvRzh36q

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) May 15, 2021

Not that I’m a stranger to that at all.

That’s just the veg side of things, which is actually the easy bit (raised beds are amazing at keeping the weeding effort down). I draw a veil over the rest of the garden which is going hard down the ‘dandelions are an excellent food source for pollinators’ route.

Meanwhile, in other news there has also been recycling done:

Be still, my beating heart, be still.