With Good Friday taken up with our final Easter holidays same-day changeover, we spent most of the remaining weekend days outdoors catching up on odd jobs. The most important thing we wanted to get done was to give our fruit trees and bushes some much-needed attention. We’re keen to maximise our crop so we can turn it into jams and chutneys to sell, but over the last two years with the building work taking up all our time, we’ve given little care to them, and our harvest has suffered as a result. So this weekend we fed the fruit bushes with potash and added magnesium sulphate to both the bushes and the orchard – both of which are designed to help them grow healthy and strong. Our quince tree has been growing lots of little offshoots underneath the main tree and every year our quinces split before they’re ready to pick and go rotten. We read that cutting back the small offshoots and mulching underneath would help focus the tree’s energy on the main crop and help retain water – so this weekend we did exactly that! It’ll be interesting to see whether it works or not. The orchard is certainly full of blossom (the pear trees and quince tree in particular) so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.
We also cut back the dead branches that were in reaching distance. Some of our trees are really suffering with disease – most of our apple trees have canker and our big plum tree looks to have silver leaf (a fungus that embeds itself on broken branches). There’s not much we can do except cut back the diseased branches and hope it doesn’t spread. And we weeded and fed the fruit cage and strawberry bed, and cut back the cultivated blackberry bushes. We already have a healthy-looking amount of flowers on our blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries… now to keep the birds and mice away…
Having run out of space in the greenhouses and the cold frame, we’ve started planting out the biggest plants. It feels like a planning challenge – rotating seed trays through the propagator and out into the greenhouse when the seedlings come up, then potting them on and finding space for them to strengthen in the plastic greenhouse and cold frame before they’re ready to go out. We still need to replace the rusted hinges on the veg bed covers so we’re taking a bit of a risk planting things without any protection from all our garden visitors! This weekend we put out the chard (left over from last year), celery (grown from the remains of shop-bought celery – an experiment this year), the peas that we’ve been hardening off over the last few weeks, and our first lettuce plants. We’re behind in our seed planting plans but are hoping that we can catch up now the weather is starting to warm. Excitingly we’re also starting to see some of the seeds growing that we’ve planted straight out – beetroot and carrot seedings are starting to appear. We’ve never been that successful at growing things straight out into the beds but this is looking fairly promising!
We started our second attempt at growing a wild flower patch at the front of the farmhouse too, between the fig and one of the apple trees. Our previous go wasn’t very successful, although the bluebells that my brother replanted this time last year have survived very well! Unprepared, we ran out of topsoil so ended up leaving some seeds to plant during the week once we’ve stocked up. It’ll look lovely if the seeds take – one of the mixes we’ve used is supposed to be attractive to our resident bats so we’re hoping it might attract a few more and make the most of our various bat lofts!
And we made a bit of progress planting up pots to go out the front of the shippon and the farmhouse. We’ve been very lucky to have had a whole range of dahlia tubers donated to us by my parents and they’re now starting to sprout. We planted the first few pots a few weeks ago and are starting to see the first shoots appear! Maybe one more push and we’ll be able to finish them all…
Ley Farm Cottages 