The day after

 

After a deliberately quiet weekend pottering around my garden in brilliant sunshine, I returned to work yesterday morning.  After just 3 hours with my wee kiddos I came home and collapsed!!!  Then slept 11 hours last night 😴 It's going to take the full phased return to get back up to full speed.  I'm trying to be patient as it will be worth it in the long term but oh it's hard!!!!

At the weekend I had to put up the old Omlet fencing round my raised beds as Tuppence has trashed them.  The small one has my 5 asparagus crowns.  I noticed the first spears popping up so weeded it and topped it up with fresh compost.  I noticed this morning that I have 3 spears that are now a few inches high.  This is year 3 for them so I can harvest lightly 😋  I read that asparagus and strawberry plants grow well together so my lovely mum has planted up some of her runners for me to put in there this Summer.

This longer bed still had a few red kale plants that were nearly finished so I pulled them out and gave them to Tuppence.  I had put cardboard and compost on it for the Winter but she has completely scratched up the decomposing cardboard and it's a mess.  I'll need to work on this bed over the Easter break as this is usually my Summer salad veg bed.

Look at that innocent face!!!

I had planned to potter in the garden today but yesterday has really wiped me out.  So it's a quiet day here, doing a few work things for tomorrow.  I did wander round and do a mental stocktake of what has survived.

Black pots are echinacea (bargain from Sarah Raven last year). It's starting to re grow already.  It'll probably be another year or two before I can harvest it and use it to make tinctures. I do have 2 larger plants in pots in my front garden.  Brown pots have the 3 blackcurrant prunings I literally just stuck in pots and they've rooted!  So that's 3 more bushes to plant at the allotment for my fruit forest bed, for free.  Blackcurrants are high in vitamin C so they're another source of healthy goodness I can preserve for Winter remedies.

This is last year's rescued rosemary plant from B&Q.  It's really doing well!

This is a mature gooseberry bush from my lovely mum's garden as she was clearing out some of her plants.  It's very prickly so will need extra careful handling when I take it to the plot!  More free plants for the fruit forest!

And finally my blueberry bushes.  All 4 have survived the Winter and are in bud.  I gave them a light prune and topped the pots up with ericaceous compost so here's hoping for an even bigger crop this year!  The fig tree has also survived and is doing well in the paler coloured pot on the right.

It's slowly coming together.  It'll take a few more years to get my perennial fruit and veg production levels up but I'm working hard on it.  I doubt I'll ever be on the same level as someone like Vivi but I really want to grow as much as I can.  We're living in scary times so the more self sufficient we can be the better!