Potted popeyes

Sunday? Sunday? Sunday? What on earth did I do last Sunday? So hard to remember when you have a list of garden tasks the length of one’s arm and a limited amount of memory in one’s hard drive. Oh, yes, I remember now. Just rootled about the photos folder and found some random pics.

I weeded the blackberry bushes. Once the soft fruit bushes were tidied and mulched, this part of the orchard looked decidedly scruffy. So I donned gloves and managed to get up all the nettles and other random weeds that were hiding underneath the bushes. Bit of a mulch from my newly filled wheelbarrow of muck. And then on with a session up at the potting shed.

I have sown pots of rocket and extra basil and two more cucumber seeds just in case the eight that I planted don’t make it through the season. Then I potted on the geraniums that I grew from seed earlier in the year. There are more than thirty of them which is a bit of a result.

They all needed a bit of a drink after their transplanting, so I zipped out to fill up the watering can from the four blue butts next to the shed. Distracted? Yes. My eye was caught by some weeds that seem to have grown up overnight right under my very nose. Up they came and then I decided to have a full tidy of this shade garden after the seedlings in the shed had their drink. Don’t the liatris now look good?

They were shaded by a large weedy mystery beast. But now can get on with putting on strong growth and hopefully flowering any month now. I want to put the extra agastache here next month. So the shade garden will almost get filled in with plants by the end of the summer. Full of perennials so there will be less work next year.

Then after lunch it was back down to the lower vegetable bed to get in all the spinach plants that are bursting out of their little pots. Here is the vast expanse of weedproof fabric that needs covering.

And here are the pots of spinach and extra beetroot that needs to go in. I don’t hold out much hope for the beetroot. I think it has been too long in pots and really should have been directly sown. But I didn’t so it will be an experiment to see if they amount to anything much.

It’s a bit of a leap of faith to imagine that this strange canvas of green and little bits of stalk are going to result to much. But the spinach ought to settle in.

And while everyone was out climbing, I took the opportunity to make an awful lot of noise by chipping all the vineyard pruning sticks that have been cluttering the parking area in front of the house. Tidy or what?