A Staycation In The Garden

A well needed break from work this week, has enabled me to spend lots of time outside in the garden. It's not been as sunny as of late and the temperature has dropped but that hasn't mattered a jot to me. The feeling of fresh air on my face, the sound of birdsong in my ears and the smell of  lilac, wafting over the garden fence from next door, has certainly raised my spirits.

This week we have been preparing the space for the greenhouse. Well I say we but really it has been Andy doing all the hard graft, although I have helped move some slabs and plopped some cement down, sometimes more of a hindrance than a help really.
The slabs are down and tomorrow we had planned to assemble the greenhouse but a game of crazy golf at the weekend has changed things around. We need a retaining wall to go behind the greenhouse and as we couldn't decide what materials to use, we were going to build that after the greenhouse had gone up but whilst playing crazy golf with our besties, we admired on the 15th hole, a fabulous retaining wall made out of railway sleepers. After searching the Internet we found a local supplier of railway sleepers and after a swift phone call, money changed hands and the railway sleepers were delivered today.http://www.ridgefarm-sleepers.co.uk/

                                                                     Andy doing his Tommy Walsh impersonation

So tomorrow Andy, with my interference, will be building the retaining wall and the greenhouse will just have to wait a little longer but it will definitely be worth the wait!

Everyday I visit my newly painted summer house, to check on the brown soil in pots and give them a water but today I was very pleasantly surprised to see little seedlings. The squash are finally making an appearance.

                                                                                            Squash Seedling

The chilies are doing well

Tomatoes aren't doing too badly either

But my most successful vegetable to date definitely has to be my purple sprouting broccoli. It's now growing in abundance and tastes absolutely lovely. Today I blanched some and popped it in the freezer and we added some to our stir fry - yum! My best friend Linda bought me a book by the RHS called Allotment Handbook and in there it states that the broccoli needs to be in the ground 42 weeks, also if you sow it in succession, you can be harvesting broccoli for 10 months of the year, although I think I might get a bit bored  of it, if I ate it for that long. 

This week I visited my first NGS garden to photograph. The garden was a little slice of heaven. Photographs in my next post. Last day of my stay cation tomorrow -  lots to pack in, so fingers crossed for dry weather or it's cagoules at the ready.