Transformation!

This was the view of the Growing Garden this afternoon – planters all filled with seeds or plugs (tomatoes, corn, beans, beetroot, carrots, parsnips and innumerable sorts of lettuces and chard) – seat base all ready to receive the seat, trellis ready for the mirror, the ground levelled with sand and soil all ready for the grass seed – and the apple blossom already falling.

How did we get there? Well, with a lot of hard work!! Here are Paula and Sue (who had been recruited for further paving works next door -– see below…) spreading the sand and Steve estimating how much soil we would need to surround our paving stones.

And here they are splitting bags, raking that sand flat and then treading down the soil.

Sue and I had honed the technique on the bare patch of ground that surrounded the old compost bin in the ‘upper garden’. First digging in the paving stones (in the Growing Garden Steve and Stephen had concreted them into place as we were going to have so much new sand and soil that they would never have been stable), then raking up the existing soil to make a tilth and finally sprinkling it liberally with ‘Tuff Grass’ – designed to withstand the worst that anyone can throw at it!

However, we had reckoned without the pigeons….. They polished off the first sprinkling on the first night, and the second sprinking on the second. At which point I remembered that had some scaffolders’ netting buried somewhere in the garage – and that certainly did the trick! A load of very frustrated pigeons and, hopefully, lots of new grass…

The good thing, however, about the pigeons’ focus on the grass seed is that they seem to have totally ignored our new seeds and seedlings in the planters. These are corn and beans, and below that is Sue planting out tiny seedlings of chard next door to rows of mizuna and rocket seeds.

Next week? The water feature….