March

Digger to the rescue!

March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb – let’s hope this old saying holds good this year!  I can’t be the only gardener frustrated by the recent cold winds and snow.  Before the snow arrived, we took advantage of a sunny weekend to put up a wooden picket fence around the veg garden, which will have chicken wire attached and buried into the ground.  This should keep the crops safe from rabbits and dogs.  The following weekend we hired a digger and dug up the drive.  The top surface of Cotswold chippings had completely degraded and we’d been left with a muddy mess.  It took a couple of days to remove mud, weeds and the old gravel, then the base layer was flattened out ready for the delivery of several tons of gravel.  This took another day to spread but the drive looks much better now so it was worth the hard work.  With the digger still here, we took the opportunity of digging out a couple of the compost heaps and turning them.  We’ve now got an enormous amount of compost ready to use!  We then turned the digger on the veg garden!  Although we intend to take a no-dig approach in future by hoeing off weeds and putting on a deep layer of compost each year, we’ve cheated a bit to start with.  Digging with a digger is much easier than with a spade, especially from my safe vantage point!  My husband and younger son made short work of scraping off the top surface of grass ready for the beds to be marked out.  We’ve a huge pile of turf to deal with but that’s for another day!