Spring gardening

We have done a bit in our garden lately.

First, I planted the raspberry canes in the area which I cleared last autumn, between the vegetable patch and the shed. This South-exposure location should be perfect for our "Autumn Bliss" raspberries. This breed should fruit in September/October time, which will be nice because by then, the strawberries will be gone.


We also purchased a small blueberry bush. I am a BIG fan of blueberries. I hope it will grow fast and give us lots of tasty fruits. The variety is "Earlyblue".

These are our apple tree first buds, which appeared exactly 2 days before the big snow showers. I took the photo after finishing planting the raspberries.

And this is how the apple tree is now:

Then, we seeded various vegetables, including: purple sprouting broccoli, green beans, tomatoes, leeks, and courgettes. The beans have not done so well (1 out of 10), we think it is not warm enough in our house. The trouble is: finding a place where it is warm but out of reach of Chatouille. So we have placed all the seed pots on the spare bedroom windowsill.

Broccoli (purple sprouting):

Tomatoes:

Broccoli (left) and courgette (right):

Courgettes:

And finally this weekend, we have trimmed the hedges (it was long overdue).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

You may not spot it immediately, but after cutting the hedge, one can see the houses behind us. We would like to cut it even lower to the height of the garages behind the garden, to get more light and make it easier to trim the hedge in the future. It looks a bit bare now but it will grow again (I hope?). Also, the garden looks bigger and it will be easier to mow the lawn on the right-hand side.

Today, Trave planted some of the potatoes, which we are going to grow in bags on the patio. We chose to grow the "Nicola" variety, which seemed to be a multi-usage potato and also fairly resistant to a few common disease. We shall see!

We now need to weed the vegetable patch a bit and plant our carrots among other things quite soon. Our vegetable patch is not very big, so we are growing tomatoes, potatoes and strawberries in containers.

Let's hope we have a fruitful harvest!