Planting up time.

Having had to remove large areas of clay from our previous garden, we realised immediately how fortunate we were in discovering we had free-draining soil at Barleycorn. It meant that when we came to carving out paths around the island beds, we could simply add all the soil from the paths onto each bed. This helped us greatly as the two mountains of soil diminished very quickly, and the extra soil increased the height of each bed.

However, we were not quite ready for planting up the beds just yet. Nature does indeed abhor a vacuum, as we discovered to our cost. There is nothing more soul-destroying to a gardener than seeing a large area which, having been cleared of weeds, begins to re-germinate within a week, due to dormant seed having been disturbed in the soil. In effect, it meant that, even after creating the island beds with soil which had been weeded, we found we had now to clear each one, in turn, of new weeds, prior to planting them up.

Nevertheless, knowing we were at this stage in the proceedings gave us the biggest pleasure of all, because it felt as if we were making real progress at last. The time had come, after many months of back-breaking toil, for regular visits to our local Garden Centres. Since a quarter of an acre of garden is a large area to fill, we knew these visits would be made each month, in order to have a continuous period of flowering throughout the year.