My peas are coming along nicely - two drainpipes are fully pea'd and the third one is almost fully up. Thirteen broad beans have already germinated :) The temperature is dropping pretty quickly here and overnight frost is becoming a real risk.
I decided to tackle the alpine strawberry bed this weekend as the various self seeded flowers have finally finished flowering. The bed has some blackberries which in theory are trained up against the stone wall that borders the bed, but in reality they're sprawling over the bed. Initially I thought the strawberries just needed thinning but it soon became apparent that the bed was riddled with those old favourites, creeping buttercup & bindweed, grrrrr.
here's the after shot !
It has now had a thorough dig over and I've tamed the blackberries. Access to the fruit has been tricky this year, so I've added a couple of paving slabs along the back of the bed.
I've now got a lovely square of clear earth to plant up next year - maybe my sweetcorn will go there :)
There are still around 50 alpine strawberry plants to be moved - for now they are heeled into a bed to keep them alive until I find somewhere for them to go permanently.
Kittie no. 4, Fergal, obviously thinks she is a herb, as she has taken up residence in the herb box - it was hard to admonish her, as she does look so pretty :)
Here is naughty kittie no. 3 practising his second favourite activity - lolling around in the sun. He loves following us around the lottie - I'm not sure he's going to shape up into much of an apprentice though...
I need to dig out our old alpine strawberries and sow some new seed. We have plants of various ages and the oldest ones aren't really very productive now.
ReplyDeleteThat creeping buttercup is a good mimic of strawberries from a distance isn't it?
lets just say I was pretty disappointed that only a quarter of the bed was actually strawberries ! am sure there is some more on the edge - I'll have another look in Spring :)
ReplyDeleteCrikey, you have been busy. I'm concluding that radical action is needed on my strawberry bed too. It's infested with couch & (worse) nettles, which makes picking the strawbs a slightly fraught business! So I think I'm doing to dig all the strawbs out, set them aside temporarily, weed the bed VERY thoroughly and replant them. That also gives me the opportunity to plant them in straighter lines than I managed when I did it the first time. Don't know what I was thinking of then (must have been drunk!)
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