No more excuses – time for weeding! 

Now we’ve finished our two new veg beds, we’ve finally had time to catch up on all the other jobs that we’ve just left… mainly weeding (no surprises that we didn’t prioritise that!), cutting back overgrown shrubs, and planting out some of the seedlings that have been sat around for the last month. Needless to say, it’s been a pretty full-on weekend!! 

Our biggest achievement has to be weeding and tidying most of the daffodil border along our wooded area. We’d started to clear part of it a few weeks ago, but the majority was so overgrown with weeds that you couldn’t even see the daffodil stems. We’d thought before this weekend that none of the irises we’d planted had come up… in fact they were just so overgrown you couldn’t see them. Next year we’ll definitely make sure we keep on top of the weeds more so we can appreciate all the flowers we planted! We’ve still got a bit more to go, but at least we’ve broken the back of the job. A few hours next weekend should do it… 

We also (finally) took the opportunity to tidy up the area around our water butt and kitchen garden. Two shrubs and a rose had been left to their own devices, which created a much-loved playground for the birds, but looked like an overgrown mess, with leggy, dead branches taking up lots of space and covering some of our rhubarb patch. We were a bit more brutal than we’d intended with our pruning, but we’ve filled the space temporarily with some of our flower seedlings, in the hope the shrubs start regrowing closer to the main stem and bush out a bit more. If nothing else, the flowers might encourage more bees and pollinating insects for this season…. 

Our next job was in the orchard. After our first fruit season in 2020, where it was a 50/50 gamble as to whether we found larvae living inside the fruit or not (I’ll never forget the first time I cut open an apple and two earwigs crawled out), we’ve worked really hard to try and get rid of them. We’ve applied nematodes both autumns to try and get rid of them naturally, and now we’ve put up codling & plum moth traps to see how successful we’ve been. The traps are supposed to catch the male moths and stop them breeding, although last year we only seemed to catch hundreds of tiny flies. Still, anything that helps!