Gardening at last!

Since we moved, it's been about the wettest weather I can remember. Day after day of rain. I know we've relocated North-West, but it seems a little excessive. The last week the weather's finally turned and we've got the chance to do some work in the garden. We've got some big compost bays to go with our other composting endeavours (a tumbling composter, a wormery and a bokashi system); we've dug some beds to grow vegetables and we've started to get control of the shrubs, cutting them back, moving them or getting rid of them entirely.

All our former seedlings still seem to be doing really well and now some of them have ended up in the ground. We've got a veg bed with 4 courgette plants in it (the picture at the bottom). We'll probably plant in between with some leafy salad-y things like rocket or land cress - and by September the courgettes should be taking over the garden as they usually do!

The tomatoes have been moved to different locations, depending on the variety. The trailing varieties are now in hanging baskets (as you can see from the picture at the top) and the upright ones are in grow-bags which will stay in the greenhouse, or have been planted by cane supports in the garden. The area we've chosen for the beds next to the greenhouse gets lots of sun - we've never grown tomatoes outside this far north, so it'll be interesting to see how they do. The last time we did tomatoes, two years ago in Cambridge, it was a terrible year and we ended up with a large crop of green ones. The upside of this was that we made green tomato chutney with them and now, 18 months or more later, it's really coming into its own.