Spring Cutting Garden

With the greenhouse full and the house looking more and more like the local garden centre with each passing day I am desperate to get into a permanent farming plot with more space for this wild new venture. My current plot is only 12X10m so high intensity planting will be the buzz word in our household.

For now I have prepared the raised beds on the plot with copuous amounts of manure and garden compost and covered them with black liner to keep the weeds at bay. In future years these will eventually become the nursery where biennials such as Larkspur, Foxgloves and Hollyhocks are direct sowed. The tulips and daddodils planted out last year are looking delicious with only a few minor hiccups - mostly of the slug kind. So these tulips were rescued before the slugs moved over to their new feast! They were all planted at the same depth so next year I think I will try planting at different depths to space out the harvest better.

The nights are slowly gettling a warmer but I have made the mistake too many times before of leaving seedings out all night, thinking they will be ok, only for a light frost to catch me out so I am trying to learn my lesson this year. Which to be fair has been pretty easy so far as the snow made sure that all gardeners got the message ! My seedlings are currently sat out on the lawn with a small poly tunnel over them which has made way inside the greenhose for the next succession of sowing.

I cant wait to start cutting the Ranunculus in a few weeks. I planted them quite late but they have faired will over the winter in pots on my greenhouse. I know now that really I should have put them into the ground on the plot and just covered them with a tunnel but they just seemed too delicate and I feared for them so much I did over protect them a bit I think. Another lesson learned and photos to come of those beauties another day.

My thoughts are now well and truly turned to Dahlias. They are one of my favourite flowers and so far they have all been potted up ready to take cuttings from before planting out in late May or early June. If you fancy growing and propagating some yourself then do check out my blog Growing and Propagating Dahlias. and also my Spring Equinox blog.