A Spring Sprucing for Summer

Spring is generally when I start to pull myself out of the doldrums, my SAD starts lightening up and I look forward to sitting out in the garden soaking up the sunshine, and creating in the fresh sea air. It’s that time of the year when we make our way out into the garden just to clear out the autumn and winter and get it ready for planting, and lounging around.

Out comes the pressure washer and patio cleaner to remove the green algae over the paving, the garden furniture makes a return after being wiped down, and cushions refreshed.

This year instead of small planters to grow herbs and suchlike in, we’ve decided to bite the bullet and buy some Veg Trugs. As I spend quite a lot of time in the back garden in my wheelchair, I like to pop my support gloves and potter around planting a few things, pruning and making things look nice. We have 3 trugs, a mini trug which is big enough to plant Andy’s herbs (coriander, mint, basil) which he’ll use in his cooking throughout the year, and 2 medium wall huggers. The medium ones are what we’re going to use to grow our peas and cucamelons in as growing the cucumbers last year in a regular grobag for me was a nightmare as I couldn’t bend over to prune them and to remove all the male flowers just to encourage the female ones to grow So moving them to a medium wall hugger should be better as I can at least do the groundwork and Andy can pinch out anything I need him to do further up.

We sorted the trugs out this week, we’ve also moved the wall planters which is where we plant a huge amount of strawberries from our local nursery the infamous Ken Muir Ltd. We’ve found that if we buy the ones from a local supermarket the strawberries are tiny and incredibly bitter, so we’re going back to buying our favourites Gariguette, Elsanta and Sonata spread around the baskets which will normally last a good few months, producing bucket loads of huge juicy sweet strawberries, so good that you can pick and eat them straight from the plant.

As a quirky addition to the garden this year we were given a beautiful outdoor clock with LED’s from Primrose. The actual clock we have has been discontinued however they do have a fabulous selection of similar clocks to add something unique to your garden. The one we have lights up at night which is perfect for us when we’re sitting in the garden late at night looking at the stars, relaxing on our loungers and looks equally as gorgeous in the daytime. If our clock was out of stock the one I would buy in a heartbeat would be the Slate Effect Outdoor Garden Clock since it’s stylish and would be a perfect fit with our patio. But there’s tonnes to choose from, just pop on over to Primrose and take a look. Primrose do an amazing range of items on their website and have quite speedy delivery, so are well worth the money. We bought our first gazebo from them so they’ve been a firm favourite since we moved here in 2007.

We also bought a brand new bird station as our last one rusted and fell apart, so a brand new one with 4 new feeders was in order (and surprisingly cheap) to keep our furry flying friends happy.

So what’s next? The only thing that is needed to finish off in the garden to make it Summer ready is varnishing – the tables and chairs we bought 3 years ago are still going strong, albeit a little tatty as they need a refresh, once that’s done, there’s only the barbecue to wash down (it’s a masonry one) so doesn’t need a lot doing and then we’re finished and ready to soak it all up.

What’s your plan of action for your garden? Are you ready for Summer yet?

A Spring Sprucing for Summer