The weather here in the UK is starting to improve, so it's time to do a bit of spring cleaning in the garden!
This is likely to be a bit of a stop-start process, with regular interruptions due to wind, rain, and work. But by doing a little bit on a regular basis hopefully I'll be able to make the garden a bit more presentable and find new places to put edible and bee-friendly plants.
But I don't want to make the garden too tidy, because a bit of undergrowth and mess is really good for the local wildlife, insects and birds.
This first photo is the bit I wanted to start with, which is the border just outside the kitchen door, starting under the hazelnut tree.
As you can see, it's a mess ! The buckets are a horrible yukkiness of stale water plus a few inches of leaves that have fallen in and part-rotted over the winter. There are quite a lot of weeds, a patch of Lords & Ladies (a nice plant, but not there, we've already got a lot of it elsewhere in the garden), and lots of general debris. Not really visible are the roses, which have flopped over where their supporting stakes have broken at ground level (they've been there a long time !)
The photo above is after the debris had been cleared away. The path was weeded and swept, the petrol cans and bags of coal moved to somewhere more suitable, and general debris thrown away. I also pruned the roses and re-did their stakes using one new one and sharpening and re-using the old ones.
The buckets were cleaned and stacked elsewhere tidily except for one, which I cleaned and refilled with fresh water. The local birdlife loves to drink from it, so I keep it topped right up to the brim in summer so they can drink whenever they want and it's high enough that if they do fall in they can easily get out again.
The blue plant pot at the bottom of the first photo was moved to outside my garden office; although the plant in it is just leaves right now, by early summer it should be a lovely tall (and bee-friendly) foxglove. The other planter, put back on the path, is a dwarf rose which will hopefully come back to life in the spring.
This final shot is after the Lords & Ladies were pulled up and the climbing plant in the flower bed trimmed back hard. That's one of those plants which is quite nice, but needs to be kept very firmly under control !
I also dug out some of the earth from the boundary between the patio and the low wall. In due course, I should probably take all of it out and replace it with gravel. Also on the menu is to put down some "Patio Magic" to restore and clean the patio slabs.
The path itself isn't really used any more, because the roses and quince bush are a lot bigger and older and overhang it a little. But it's a good hard-stand for planters, and an attractive feature in it's own right.
The plan is that when the weather warms up a bit, I'll dig up the bed to it's right (keeping anything that's grown into something useful or interesting) and plant some herbs there. They'll be good for the bees, and easy to get to from the kitchen whenever we want to cook with them.
So that's the spring cleaning so far. It's not much, but it's a start !