Gardening month

I now have a selection of seeds to plant, plus some strawberry plants and a couple of courgette plants as I failed to completely convince Chris to do all our veg from seed!  Never mind, I have made a start with tomatoes (cherry and beefsteak), cut-and-come-again lettuce, beetroot and cucumber.

Our truckle of sunflower seeds and various vegetables

Chris has dug out two beds ready for planting.  Potatoes have already gone in; they are definitely Chris' thing - so he chooses the varieties, feeds and nurtures them and then his favourite bit is digging them up "like finding treasure"!  Potatoes are one of the most successful vegetables to grow for us.  Years ago, when we started gardening in our allotment in Bristol, we did things properly - by chitting the potatoes and keeping them in trays in our airing cupboard for weeks in our flat, before sowing them out in our beds.  Now, we just sow our seed potatoes straight into well dug beds and they still seem to do really well.

The most exciting plants that we will sow from seed this year are the ones we collected for free from the French countryside on our holiday last August.  We have been visiting a beautiful area - Charente-Maritime - for a few years now, and just by where we stay they have beautiful fields full of sunflowers.  We collected a small bag of seeds from the side of a field near our gite and hope to bring a bit of France to our Hampshire garden this year.

Our family holiday in Charente-Maritime, August 2011

We have made a good start on tidying and have filled up our two garden bags.  Must remember to put them out tonight to be collected by the council!  We now need to tend to some of the fences and tidying up the beds where the chickens and dog have been digging.  Nuri seems to have turned into a teenager dog and has been a real mischief in the garden!  His latest games seem to be chasing the chickens, eating their layer mash, and digging holes to get into our neighbour's garden!