Remember my last garden update back in October? My fence had just blown down in a storm and we were waiting for someone to come and build us a new, improved fence.
Well, we now have our new improved fence and even though January isn’t exactly the best time to do much in the garden, there are a few little jobs that we’re getting in with this month.
First things first, we have a new addition to the garden although it’s debatable whether he’s going to be a permanent fixture…
Even though it’s a container-grown tree and ‘should’ be able to continue growing happily in a container outside, I’ve heard that it’s notoriously difficult to manage to keep these trees healthy as they go from the warm house to the cold outdoors. We’re going to try our best though so watch this space.
We’re also taking care of our feathered visitors with our homemade bird feeders because we want them to become regular visitors over the course of the year.
As I’ve never been that into gardening, I didn’t realise how much help some birds can be when you’re growing fruit and veg in your garden. Apparently, they eat some of the pesky pests that can damage your plants so they should be encouraged where possible.
It’s a bit too early to start planting most things that we plan to grow this year but I know that chilli and garlic should be planted this month and that spinach will do well in the greenhouse at this time of year too so I’ve ordered what I need to get that done.
We’re still using last Summer’s crop of chillis as I froze what we didn’t use at the time so we have a half-full tub of frozen chillis which I think will see us through to when the new ones are ready to harvest.
The next few months will be busier as far as our greenhouse planting is concerned but for now, I think we’ve done as much as we can do in there.
One of the things we wanted to do in the garden, probably along the back fence is to have some container grown fruit bushes and trees so I’ve also ordered a couple of container-grown blueberry plants to start us off. I’ve done some research and I *think* they’ll be OK in the Winter as they’re quite hardy. Because they’re container plants, I can always move them into the greenhouse if we get an exceptionally cold spell.
And just in case you were wondering, we’re sticking to container plants at the moment for the garden as we’ve been told that the quality of our soil is very poor and that any plants we want to grow would struggle to flourish unless we do something that sounded quite complicated to make it more plant friendly. It definitely sounded like a lot of work so we thought containers would be the way to go for us.
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