Spring has sprung !

What a cracker of a day! Really warm and sunny - just what was needed to perk everything up in the garden.
First off, Richard and Sally have spent the easter week completing the glazing of the greenhouse and installing the staging, so today I set about filling it.

The greenhouse is now home to 16 young tomato plants (6 x Tigerella, 6 x Golden Sunrise and 4 x Black Russian Cherry), 5 young Capsicums, and newly sown :- Courgettes, Cucumber, Runner Beans, Crimson Flowered Broad Beans, Kale, Cabbage, PSB, Lettuce, Beetroot, Cauliflower, Savoy Cabbage, Delphiniums, Hollyhocks, Sunflowers and some young Heleniums and sweet peas (which had their growing tips pinched out today).

Just need to decide on a final floor layout and get the raised beds built and filled in time for the toms etc to be planted out.

I took the opporchancity of such a warm, still morning to spray the area round the greenhouse, as well as all the paths, the unreclaimed area of the fruit border and round the base of the apple trees with weedkiller.
Elsewhere, I planted out the onion sets, and sowed 5 rows of carrots in the temporary veg bed

I mustn't forget to mention that if you click on this photo to enlarge it and compare it to any earler shots of the same border, you will notice that the dry stone wall at the bottom of the bed has been rebuilt in sterling fashion - well done Richard - sorry I didn't mention it when you came down with a coffee this morning! In the borders, the daffies are going over but the tulips are all in flower and the oriental poppies are just starting. Here are some pics but sorry if they seem too light, the camera I was using doesn't auto adjust like the Nikon does.

The purple tulips in the top pic are in the small bed just inside the doorway and are mixed with white tulips tinged with purple, as well as a Rosa Rugosa and a silver pear tree, so as Sally had two young Hebe "Purple Shamrock" which go well with these colours, I planted them out in this bed.

I finished the afternoon off by weeding the two herbaceous borders with the Wolf Soil Miller, and just to prove I was watching what I was doing, I marked about twenty or so very small baby lupins, all self seeded, with canes, so that I didn't inadvertantly hoe them up. These will be left to grow on a bit before I dig them up and move them.

The borders are looking considerably further on than last week - which shows what a run of four or five consecutive warm days can do in such a sheltered garden - the peonies are showing colour through their buds, the geraniums are now formed into perfect mounds and have a lot of flower buds on them, all the hemerocallis have lots of buds, the cherry trees still look incredibly healthy compared to last year, there is blossom on all the fruit trees and bushes, the roses are looking healthy, the ornamental quince is flowering itself stupid, the Centaurea is starting to flower, and finally, as another nod to Richard's rapidly improving skills as a gardener, here is a photo of the flowers on the geranium that he rescued from death's door

That's it for this week folks, see you next time.............