Garden

Aside from the apple tree (which even produced several apples in its first year!), we've been settling in to the garden at the new house. The older three girls have loved digging and planting and we've done pretty well, helped by the glorious summer. We grew a lot of flowers, as well as peas, carrots (well 1 carrot - I accidentally dug them up after planting them...), potatoes, broccoli, onions, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, and various herbs. There were also some butternut squash but they don't really seem to have come to anything.

I (with a lot of help from the girls carrying and digging) have done a bit of rearranging too. We invested in some outdoor furniture and a larger barbecue that have seen a lot of use, and these needed a patio. We were fortunate to get a load (more than 30) of slabs from freecycle, so over a couple of months doing 2-3 at a time as we could squeeze in time for, we got the patio laid out. I also lifted a fair bit of grass and put in a layer of sand to deal with the excessive sogginess of the garden and (thankfully as was a lot of work) this seems to have made a lot of difference.

Great times and a lot of fun outdoors.

This was the view near the start of the year.
I quite liked the pattern the rain has left in the sand under the table!

Moving on a bit, the pile of turf has grown! I used this to replace the moss at the soggy end of the garden.

Done! The bricks were leftovers from the garage conversion.

Peas in. Most of these didn't make it to our table, the girls like to eat them straight from the plants, and that's just fine.

A wee display out the front of the house too.

We did get a decent haul of potatoes.

Not our carrots, but those are out tatties. And the spicy stuff on the chicken came back from a Japanese market. Yum.

I got given care of some pepper plants that were started by my sister then briefly cared for by my Dad. I've never had much success with these but these seemed to be the mostly healthy ones we've ever had.

 

Look! Peppers!

The red onions came out particularly well.

We had loads of them too!

Sunflowers doing very well - that's what happens when there's a lot of sun.