Colouring In

Finally the long boprders are beginning to get a fair bit of colour about them, but more of that later.
This morning I put more support rings on the cordon sweet peas which are beginning to grow a bit more strongly now.....

I then weeded the veg patch and gave the carrots, beans, beetroot and brassicas a good watering. And all the spuds are beginning to show themselves now too.

Then it was time to don the knapsack sprayer again and spray off the area that will eventually become the permanent veg patch. So it was out with the Gallup 360 (Glyphosate) and begin the battle. Currently this area is a  mass of ground elder, rosebay willowherb, fallen trees, wild blackcurrant bushes etc but once I get the majority of the weeds away I will be able to work out the best plan of action to get it up and running for next seasons veg.

After this Sally brought down some ground cover fabric and I laid this on the topside of the raspberry bed. The fabric covers approximately12 sq metres and thsi area will be the new strawberry bed.

I planted out 12 x Elsanta bare root runners, 7 x Malwina bare root runners ands 6 cell grown Finesse strawberry plants. These were planted thrugh the fabroc and given a good watering to help sttle them in. They do look a little bit lost in that expanse of black groundcover but the plan is to multiply our stock from runners so it hopefully won't be too long before we fill the allotted area.

I also planted out the dahlia tubers and some more phlox, all in the lower of the long borders, tied the hollyhocks to their support canes and started to train the border sweet peas up their cane wigwams.

Onto the colour I was talking about at the start of this post. New colour since last week has come in the form of another garden original - the Iris pictured below. This was in one clump last year but I divided it into 5 last autumn and although th flower pictured above is the only one to open so far, there are lots more to come. 

However, the oriental poppies, red hot pokers and lupins (more on these later) really do brighten the border up - nowhere more so than at the end of the top border nearest the summerhouse.

So I'll finish this post with these two pictures of the long borders - one standard potting view and the other taken from the roof of the potting shed. As for the lupins - there is a huge variety of colour variation this year so I have taken some pics of them all and will put them on a seperate post.

See you next week !