Lovely Spring Days and Garden Busyness

Today was the first day of daylight savings this year.  For all we'd been forecast for rain or overcast weather, it dawned bright and sunny and stayed that way.

As I've just changed the days I work to give me Sunday morning off, Hubby and I had been discussing what needed doing the most and what we were going to do today and had not come up with any clear plan.  There's always plenty to do and not enough time to get it all done.  We always seem to have at least ten projects on the go and which gets worked on depends on dramas that may make them more urgent, weather, motivation or just what we feel like doing today.

While I was waiting for him to come outside, I popped into one of our vege patches and started weeding.  The recent rains had made the weeds take off, so it was needed.  He came out and joined me.

One bolted Brussels Sprout plant

I've never grown Brussels Sprouts before, so I looked at my plants unsure whether they were supposed to look like this, or if they had bolted.  Miss Nine (very nearly Ten!) had a friend come over and her Mum is a keen and knowledgeable gardener so I asked her while she was here.  No, she told me, they've bolted.  Bugger.  I left two in (one purple and one normal one) to go to seed and hopefully their babies will be more successful.  The rest I pulled up and gave to the cattle.  

Just in case we'd forgotten, the chooks reminded us why the vege patch has bird netting.

Our self-sown radishes were just starting to bolt, so I've left a few for seed and pulled up the rest.  I'm the only one who eats radishes, so I might have a go at making the rest into a pickle or chutney rather than let them go to waste.

We started on the next patch, which we got through quite quickly given how neglected it's been over the last few months.  Planted some green beans and two grafted tomato plants in there and it seems to be fairly full now, or rather it will be as soon as they all get bigger. 

At that point, we stopped for lunch and tried to decide what we were going to do for the afternoon.  My body was struggling with anything heavy so I suggested we go and work on the paths and whatnot that we're putting in front of the tyre wall garden.

Hubby has been getting stones from a workmate who has been doing some work at his place that involved getting rid of several tonnes of stones.  So far the estimate for what we've taken is at four tonnes and they've been sitting in the driveway waiting for us to get their final home sorted.  Yesterday while out shopping for other things, we bought several rolls of weedmat just for this, so I thought it would be a good idea to lay the weedmat and start shifting stones. 

I did the lighter work of laying the weedmat and tucking it around the tyres, while Hubby shovelled stones into the wheelbarrow and followed me along tipping it onto the weedmat.  Initially it was just enough to hold the weedmat in place, then it was dump and spread.

Once we got to that stage, I started weeding the tyres too.  We'd filled in underneath them with weeds and garden trimmings, so there's plenty of weeds growing up through them.  Less than half of the tyres are filled with any kind of soil or compost so far.  Those I have filled in the past, much of it has settled and sunk and needs topping up.  Although the strawberries I planted in a few of the tyres a couple of years ago are still going strong and even giving us babies on runners.

We've moved about a quarter of the stones now before deciding that was enough for today.  I'm proud of what we've managed to achieve in just one motivated Spring day.