[Affinity for Earth] Starting to plant...
The various plants and seeds that have ordered have started to come, so hopefully over the next month I will be able to gradually fill up all the empty beds in the garden. I have started to germinate some veg and bedding plant seeds indoors and have planted out the first pre-started sweet pepper seedlings to arrive. I have some snowdrops-in-the-green to put in along the back of the cold frame/permanent raised bed, between them and the wall, and have transplanted the pear tree from its bucket to the bed it will need to grow up through. I was slightly worried as a few of the new leaves curled up after transplanting as it is really the wrong time of year, but it seems to have got over the move now (and hopefully now it has more space, won't be so wet, and has had special tree-root-aiding spores added to the roots it ought to do better overall).
The arch fell over as I had assembled it and propped it up against a wall before setting it into the ground properly, and as it fell it broke a pot/one corner, but it is very fixable - I will wait until I have the foundations ready before picking it back up though.
The largest scale thing I have done recently is construct a permanent erinaceous (acidy) bed for cranberries and blueberry bushes, to go between the raised beds and the flowerbed along the back wall (behind the cherry tree) and join them up. Now that the plants are in this it suddenly looks very finished and solid, I am pleased with the way it has turned out (though I am slightly worried that when the soil gets very heavy with water it will sag the wicker-and-plastic sides out and I'll need to get some metal stakes to keep them vertical). The back wall of the bed has been kept off the boundary fence using parts of the posts from my old four poster bed, which pleases me, and the bed itself is topsoil and bags of erinaceous compost over a thick layer of gravel for drainage, at present.
The arch fell over as I had assembled it and propped it up against a wall before setting it into the ground properly, and as it fell it broke a pot/one corner, but it is very fixable - I will wait until I have the foundations ready before picking it back up though.
The largest scale thing I have done recently is construct a permanent erinaceous (acidy) bed for cranberries and blueberry bushes, to go between the raised beds and the flowerbed along the back wall (behind the cherry tree) and join them up. Now that the plants are in this it suddenly looks very finished and solid, I am pleased with the way it has turned out (though I am slightly worried that when the soil gets very heavy with water it will sag the wicker-and-plastic sides out and I'll need to get some metal stakes to keep them vertical). The back wall of the bed has been kept off the boundary fence using parts of the posts from my old four poster bed, which pleases me, and the bed itself is topsoil and bags of erinaceous compost over a thick layer of gravel for drainage, at present.