Ladies day and a celebration

Life has been slightly on hold this past week with lots of telephone tennis with estate agents and solicitors trying to finalise the details of our house sale. Finally today we exchanged contracts and have a moving date of 18th May. This is fantastic news as we've been trying to move for over a year now.

Before I had received this good news, I wanted to distance myself slightly from the events, so I decided to take my daughter for a ladies excursion to Sissinghurst. I'm very fortunate to have this fantastic inspirational garden of Vita Sackville West on my doorstep and will miss being able to visit so easily once I've moved down to the coast. Being with my daughter meant any detailed observations of planting schemes and plant varieties was almost impossible. I was able to take a few quick snaps to give an overall impression, and visit the newish vegetable garden which had just opened for this year.

Euphorbia

Clematis montana

Meadow with Wisteria in background

Poppies

 

 

April muddle

It's at this time of year I tend to get terribly confused at what needs to be done by when, and usually get in a bit of a tizzy and miss out some essential jobs. This year I'm determined to do little and often with regards to hoeing, watering and sowing seed, which sounds like such a basic list of things to do, but they can so often go neglected by a few days and suddenly you have a glut of jobs to catch up on. Today I was feeling a bit low (pregnancy wise) so decided not to work hard at anything. Instead I enlisted my kind husband to fill up my water butt for me, with a water sack I bought ages ago which is slightly leaking, but needs must. This meant I was at least able to water a few seedlings and not worry to much about things withering. To cheer myself up a bit, I brought my seed sowing kit indoors tonight and crossed off a long list of plants that needed to be sown. They are as follows:

Cucumber spacemaster
Dill
Basil
Tom Thumb lettuce
San Marzano Tomato
French Bean Neckar Queen
French Bean Cobra
Swede Marian
Beetroot Boltardy
Beetroot Burpees Golden
Queen anne's lace
Calendula Indian Queen
Larkspur

The last three are cutting flowers, I am experimenting with a few this year as well as the usual wildflower mix which seems to love my poor soil!

I am growing so much from seed as so little seems to germinate well on my plot. Even the lettuce sown 12 days ago has failed to come up yet, and that's usually a failsafe. I know some of the things hate being transplanted, but if I don't plant relatively big plants, they just don't make it. For example, in a row about 2.5 metres long of parsnips, only 3 have germinated. Either they don't like the soil, or the slugs have polished them off, hard to tell! On a plus note, my asparagus has not given up, there were three new spears appearing this evening, so if they have gone tomorrow, I will know something is definitely chomping it. I can't wait till May when everything gets more established!