Boot sale gardening

Boot sale bargains

We had a little mosey around the boot sale this morning and I picked myself up a few bargains for the princely sum of £1.60. I’m a sucker for bright bangles, so I couldn’t resist these blighters.

The other stuff is intended for the garden, although I’ve not quite come up with a use for the little wooden bowl with a stand, but it was 10p so I just couldn’t resist. Something will turn up that I can use it for!

The other wooden bowl has already been put to good use on the garden table as a little holder for the cactuses. They look very cute! It’s nice to find little wooden vessels for a few pence, they look so lovely. The garden is starting to take shape for the year now and with all the beautiful weather we’re having it’s a real pleasurable place to sit out in. I like finding all these bits of junk to contain my plants, it adds real character to the space. We shall have to start looking at the weather forecast and planning when we can get a few people over for a BBQ.

In other gardening news, I got a new grow bag today, so half of my little courgette plants have been planted out to make their way in the world. If they’re anything like the potatoes I shall be posting next week, boasting of the incredible size to which they’ve grown! They’re nice strong little seedlings so I am hoping they will take quickly, but we’ll see.

All the bits and bobs in the mini greenhouse are growing nicely too, except one of my two melon babies dried out while we were away in Italy. I need another growbag really to put the melon in, but I’m not sure it’s worth it just for one plant, so I might just put it in a big planter in the greenhouse. That was the last of my seeds so if I don’t manage to get a melon of my very own this year I may give it up as a bad job!! Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t. Last years melon plants were very leggy but I think the tomatoes were stealing some of their light, so I shall endeavour to avoid repeating the error.

My quick cut and come again lettuces have sprung up well over the last fortnight in the mini greenhouse, so we can start harvesting those now, as and when we need them. As all the other veg seedlings have been planting out I have a spare seed tray, so I’m tempted to start off a new lot that will keep us going in about three week when we’ve ravaged this lot.

All the veg is having moderate success. I have sprouts, onions, swedes and sweetcorn coming along relatively well in the border. As usual carrots are faring with mixed success – this seems to be another veg that doesn’t really like me, but that’s ok – they’re pretty cheap anyway!

French beans bottom left

We’ve got some really strong french bean and broad bean seedlings so one of my jobs for this week hopefully is to make some nets that I can attach round the place for them to climb up. I’m hoping to train the French beans to climb up the crates and then on up the fence which will look really cool if it works out!

And finally, for those of you who have been following my springtime gardening posts, here are the epic potatoes. They continue to grow out of all reasonable proportion and the potato bag is a constant devourer of any spare compost. There’s still a good 2 inches to fill at the top and then really we should start mounding it up, but our compost bin simply cannot keep up!!