Pushing up the daisies

It is amazing what you can do in half an hour. As the weather has finally turned clement, I decided last night to go down and water the new sowings. I spent half an hour down there and managed to do all this:

• water the radishes, carrots, strawberries, peas (just breaking through the soil!) and herbs,
• water the seed box where lettuce, leeks, spring onions and flowers are germinating,
• spread a little more manure on the potato bed.
• scratch out the surface soil in the flower beds and around the garlic and artichoke and add more manure and water it in.
• get the hand trowel and make a quick tour of the edges and pull out numerous dandelions and plantains that have sprung up almost overnight. Those b**&^$£ds won't be seeding, not this time...

Perhaps weeding like this could turn out to be time better spent than huge blocks of time, where you get frustrated and tired pulling out huge amounts of weeds?
I also looked around the top end of the plot. This is where I have sundry items like the herb bed, the water containers, and a few random flowers (lavender, a rose bush, some daffs, some mint, some annuals that pop up each year like Honey wort, marigolds and lemon balm, mostly to attract insects). It tends to get infested by grass, and the soil is gradually falling down over the path. I was wondering if I wouldn't try to make a much clearer well defined bed, with some tiles or wood to prop it up, and I was thinking of digging over a small patch (about 50x50 cm) next to the water barrels that generally just goes wild, but where I could establish a small square bed. I was thinking a mixture of flowers, like hollyhocks that could lean against the corner post, zinneas, and small crops like cress, radish (again! my radish obsession!), chives, rocket, which would create a nice "corner" to the plot and prevent soil movement all at the same time. hmmmm...

Labels: flowers, garlic, herbs, spring, weeds