Down at the bottom of the garden

As the weather has improved myself and the Jam have been spending some time at home, admiring the pair of red Kites that seem to live around our house and sorting out the garden. First it was the really tedious weeding/clearing bit (with Jam seemed to love but with which I will not bore you) then came the adding new stuff/exciting bit. So with a clearish garden we started....

My mum is a bit of a green fingered wonder and very kindly supplied us with 3 lots of Potatoes, charlotte, an unspellable one and my favourite (because of the name) International Kidney. All of those as you can see are doing very well indeed. She also gave us a butternut squash and thanks to the wonder of the Internet/Twitter myself and folk legend James Fagan have begun squash racing (neither of us have grown them before, I checked the progress of mine last night & it's not looking good :-).

We grew from seed 3 different types of bean, my dad's tried and tested runners (prizewinner they are called, he has grown them every year since we were little), bollotti beans and some french beans as well. All the Raspberry bushes have been cleared (and are spreading like wildfire) as have the redcurrants, blackcurrants and rhurbarb (although I caved in and bought more strawberries after outs got killed by the frost, these are residing quite happily next to the Fig). The 'Rose Grove' (my tiny collection of Olives from which one day I will make oil) is also still doing well.

Fruit and veg pretty much sorted (we planted some chard, beetroot and onions in a spot by the house, but they haven't come up, so let us never speak of it again) I then turned my quite short attention span to flowers. This beautiful clematis was a survivor from a couple of years ago so it got repotted and made centre of attention next to a 'rescued' (read half dead but cheap in a garden centre) *%£^&$£% and a hydranger that I got last year. The major new additon was a beautiful passion flower (I've always wanted one but they are expensive!) which my mum's cousin very kindly put some money towards it (I've started experimenting with pressed flower cards again and one of the first of the new set is a passion flower thank you card for Auntie Adrienne). We've also just had a new garden centre take over where a old rose breeder used to live. The new garden centre were selling off the dwarf roses really cheap (£3, they used to be loads more expensive than that) so I bought two of those too, one is white but without a label, the other purple/blue and called rhapsody in blue. The plan is coming together but like most things it will be a while before it's completely perfect...