Oh yes, oh yes, It's Springtime!

So Spring has sprung in a big way over the last few weeks! Winter has officially left, and the plants and chickens have taken their cue and started to get more productive.

Firstly, our Rhode Island Red chickens are almost a year old and up until two weeks ago they hadn't laid a single egg between them. With the warming of the weather, between the two RIRs and two Australorps we are getting up to three eggs a day. It's an awesome feeling to be getting more eggs than we can eat at the moment!

Secondly, the plants are definitely reacting to the warm weather too. The deciduous ornamental trees (such as our Liquid Amber) are starting to shoot again, along with the stone fruit trees. I think there are about 3 flowers on the Cherry trees, not quite a bumper harvest, but it's good to see they're establishing themselves.

Today I'd planned to do a fair bit of work, but the weather's conspired against me and we're in for rain most of the weekend. In between the showers, I've been pottering a little. My main aim this weekend was to build a small retaining wall for one of my raised garden beds. Lately they've been getting "attacked" by some of the local wild birds chasing bugs and worms. I find though that the birds prefer to dig at the base of the garden beds rather than from the top. Hopefully just a single layer of 20cm/8in besser blocks will help stop them digging as much.


This is the first garden bed I'm working on. The garden slopes a little, so I will backfill with dirt on the right side of the photo, but from the house you'll be able to see the blocks (rather than just the garden bed). To make it a little more interesting though, the blocks also provide a great planting space for other small plants, so this one will have a border of strawberries. The strawberries will also benefit from a sort of micro-climate in that the blocks will warm up in the sunshine, as well as having them elevated off the ground. We lost quite a few last year to rotting on the ground.

After filling the holes with potting mix, I then transplanted and divided a number of plants from elsewhere in the garden. When we moved in last year, I really just put plants where ever we had room at the time, now that we're getting more established, I'm finding more permanent places for them.

The remaining plants in the garden bed are a row of Savoy Cabbages, Garlic and Cauliflowers. There were more cabbages and cauli's, but the birds destroyed a few searching for worms. The garlic was simply some left over shop-bought garlic from the fridge - it's really just an experiment to see how it goes.

There's still a bit of work left to do, but I'm anticipating it will be a great summer harvest!