We moved into the house on Friday March 9th, and took 3 hectic and sunny days to look at the garden & allotment, invite friends over for a curry, and to generally unpack our clothes and deal with a newly moved 2 year old. Priorities, I suppose...though I was itching to get going in the garden.

There's an unknown tree, quite pleasant and a nice size. An unknown shrub, recently trimmed back. A cobble stone area which was once a water feature but is now a bunch of stones, with a couple of sedums growing in it. There's a gorgeous fern which we will be keeping, oh yes we will. There's 2 palmy things which neither of us are very keen on, but my mum likes them, so I guess that's Mother's Day sorted. There's a weird 'raised bed' with bricks stacked up, kind of falling down, but it'll do us for a while.

The neighbours overgrown shrubs shade our garden on one side, but the rest of it gets a lot of sun. It all has potential...

11/03/07 - started to lay down the outline of one bed in the garden with sand. Didn't get very far, what with the aforemantioned 2 year old and a hubby wanting to unpack boxes and so on rather than getting on with the garden. Still, he'll be back to work soon so I can get on with it then...

12/03/07 -
We planned out the bed outlines for each crop, and outlined the opposite bed as well. Labels were added to mark out which crops are where, so we know where to start first and where to manure or not. I also did my first seed sowing, in windowsill propagators: Tomato (Gardener's Delight and Tigerella) ; Radish (Rainbow Mixed); OKra (Clemson's Spineless); Thyme (Orange Scented) and Mint; Broad Bean Express, Onion Bedfordshire Champion, Leek Musselbugh - as well as Nasturtium, Calendula, and Sweet Pea.

The Tigerella, Radish, Mint, and Broad Bean are all newly bought this year, the Gardeners Delight, Okra, Thyme, Onion, Leek and the three flowers are all unopened but have been sitting about in my seed collection for varying amounts of time. The Onion and Leek are both six months out of date, but we also have onion sets and my mum has some Leek Musselburgh seeds, so I might as well at least try them. They were part of a vegetable seeds collection with a 'mass' use by date of six months ago so it's entirely possible that they might still be fine.

Either way, it feels pretty cool to be starting, at last. Actually, it feels completely mad to be even in this house, let alone sowing our first seeds...