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A great time for gardeners

Gardening in the Forest of Dean This time of year is fantastic for gardening and gardeners. Last weeks cold snap has been replaced with warm sunny weather and we have been busy planting out in the garden. Our sweet peas and climbing fuchsias are big enough and as you can see we now have them out in various places in …

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Pea Sticks collected from the Forest of Dean

Pea Sticks Our early peas are coming on nicely now. We had protected them from the birds but now they need some support. So as we are living in the gorgeous forest of dean we took a little trip up the road and there of course wood that is ideal for pea sticks is in abundance. ( we do have …

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Potting On

Gardening has been a real joy this last week. Today I have been out in the sunshine potting on. We have re potted climbing fuschias , sweet peas, spring onions and strawberries. I have also planted runner bean seeds and some climbing french beans, so hopefully the next few weeks should see them coming up. New potatoes are springing up …

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Compost is the fuel for your garden

We have now been gardening here for nearly a year and I did start a compost heap. Now looking at it it doesn’t look terribly wonderful, but we have never stopped adding to it so the top layers are really bound to look like that. So I took the top layer off and started shoveling out the compost and used …

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Zen and the art of Gardening

The Benefits of Gardening Many people have written and spoken of the benefits of gardening on health from newspapers to the national health service, but most of them only mention the physical side. I’m not decrying that, naturally good physical health is vital to us all and even just pottering is beneficial, but there is more to be gained than …

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Early planting has paid off

Planting early vegetables in the garden It is of course always a gamble to plant vegetables early as a late frost can damage your plants, but as we were so late last year we decided to take a chance and so far it has paid dividends. You can see from the picture on the left some of our early carrots. We …

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Exciting times in the garden

Spring is on it’s way although it is a bit chilly this morning. I have potted on our climbing fuchsia plants. We have 3 varieties, Lady Boothby, Pink Fizz and Lady in Black. Spring onions are coming up in seed trays now and should be ready to go out in the next week or so and this weekend I’ll be planting …

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Spring planting in the garden

Early Planting in the garden The weather has been very mild here in the forest of dean and the forecast is looking good for the next month as well, so I have taken a chance with some early planting. My deep beds have all had compost and well rotted manure forked in, and I have early peas showing and I …

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Dive bombed by squabbling sparrows in the garden

The garden in Cinderford Well, yesterday we dropped into Coleford Garden Centre and bought a new arch for the garden. Like all these things you have to put the thing together before you can use it. While we were struggling with screwing it all together a pair of sparrows suddenly dived down and missed us by inches. They were squabbling and …