This gardening lark aint easy...

I feel like the garden has given up on me, what was once (a few weeks ago) full of hope and empty raised beds waiting to be filled is now full of gloom, heavy wet soil and still empty looking.

What is left of the Parsnip seedlings I planted havent grown, the rest are slowly feeding the hoards of slugs that visit the raised beds at dusk.

The Beetroot seedlings are doing a bit better, not growing but mustnt be as nice to eat for the slugs.

I have a continuing battle picking the blighters off the Onions every evening but I seem to be keeping atop of that problem (they dont like the Garlic as much it seems).

The 'greens' are ok thanks to plastic bottles covering them and I have invested in some copper foil to go around their bed. The slugs dont seem to cross it (so far).

I managed to mow the grass around the beds yesterday (in between showers) so they dont have as much hiding places today. If it wasnt for the resident frogs I shudder to think of the infestation of slimey pests we would have.

Outside may be sad this week but inside the polytunnel we are getting a loads of  Strawberries every day.

But turns out we are not the only ones 'enjoying' them, found a 'stash' of them in a corner of the tunnel.....

I am hoping its only mice........

Catch up in the polytunnel

Well hello again blog!
Its been a while blog, have you missed me?

I had great plans (& pictures) to blog about some Tomato plants, weeks ago,which failed to come to fruition.....until now.

Once upon a time I had a space in the polytunnel and some growbags.........

And outside our back door I had some of these(Gardeners Delight), which had been 'hardening off' the previous week or so in a small plastic greenhouse.....

So with a coupla Bamboo sticks, some twine and a scissors we have these.....

I really dislike throwing away living plants so I potted up the 4 spares; hence the pots in the middle of the bags. This year I put 2 plants per bag rather than 3 like I did last year (only 2 out of the 3 bore fruit).

On the other side of the polytunnel we decided to grow our Strawberry plants this year. This is half of them...

Plenty of flowers (& future Strawberries).....

And while watering the tunnel our resident slug eater peeped out for a shower..

Wish he had a few more friends though because we could do with alot less slugs in our garden, with all this wet weather they are breeding like rabbits!
And speaking of rabbits we spotted 2 during the week in our garden browsing over newly planted seedlings....... its never ending with this gardening lark.

The hard slog before the nice stuff

If there was one thing I dislike about gardening its weeding ( I have mental scars about weeding as a child that will take years to erase! lol).

I can tell you that digging and making raised beds is much easier than digging out stubborn weeds, whose roots run alot deeper in the soil than the stems above the ground! (Or maybe I have conveniently forgotten how hard it was to do the beds last year!)

If the weather had been kinder to us over the past few months I might have gotten to the weeds earlier but alas Mother Nature had other ideas and left us with a waterlogged garden.

Now the grass has turned to meadow and I have very little motivation to go back out tommorow and do more. I suppose its not that bad, I did get a bit done today so I will have less to do....
This was once the Carrot bed ......

I turned the compost heaps today, some nice compost but still plenty of rotting to do before I can use it in the garden. I even found some Rocket growing in it!

While weeding the beds I found loads of these, great to get rid of some before they hatch or whatever its called with slugs...

But I did come across this wee guy in our polytunnel so maybe slug control wont be soo hard this year.. (they were regular visitors in the tunnel last year)

Have left some polythene in the corner under the potting table in the polytunnel esp for him to hide under so he might stay around for the growing season..