Like many gardeners up and down the country, I'll be indulging in a spot of gardening this bank holiday weekend.
Like many gardeners up and down the country, I'll be indulging in a spot of gardening this bank holiday weekend. And the next, and the one after that. The truth is, I'm really far behind and if I don't catch up soon, I'll miss this year's boat to a pretty garden and home-grown veg.
Starting indoors, there's a propagator, containing seedlings of basil and garlic chives, which are in dire need of transplanting. I also need to pot on the sunflowers I'm growing as part of the Gardeners' World sunflower challenge. They're tall, but only because they're leggy. What's more, the bucket of sludge I had planned to grow one of the sunflowers in has now been completely emptied by the marauding blackbird, Sid, in search of worms. Which brings me to the first of my outdoor jobs: sweep and scrub the patio.
The pond is full of duckweed and not much else, so I'll remove that and find out what happened to the watercress and water forget-me-not (bounced out by bathing pigeons, probably). Then I need to top up a few pots, transplant my display of Allium roseum and phacelia from one pot into another, and sort the herb pot out.
As much as I love my frogs, I'll be dismantling their grow bag habitat. There's plenty of dense foliage for them to shelter beneath now and, as soon as I get a moment, I'll be putting the new grow bag out with fresh tomato plants, so they can sit in there, if they like. It just won't have the attractive topping of dead foliage and Christmas tree branches, which I have lived with for long enough.
I'd decided to leave all the seedlings emerging in the borders to see what they'd turn into. Trees, mostly. So I'll be removing them, along with some plants I'm donating to some friends, and adding nicer ones I recently dug up and divided from my mum's garden.
Some plants need moving, some need supporting, some need feeding, some need pruning. Many just need sowing.
I need to cut the lawn (we don't have a mower so we do this on our hands and knees with shears.) Luckily it's full of dead patches so it shouldn't take long. Then I'll sow grass seed in the dead patches. I'm also cultivating a small wildflower meadow among the long grass, so I'll transplant some self-sown field poppies here and remove some ragwort I accidentally transplanted the other week.
If it rains, I'll be busy sowing fresh chives, coriander, flat-leaf parsely and cosmos seeds indoors, and encouraging the sole survivor of last year's overwintering chilli experiment to burst into leaf. There's also a theatre to make for the auriculas, which have just come into flower. I've only had a year to do that job...
What jobs will you be striking off your gardening 'to-do' list this bank holiday?
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