A lot of work for as yet largely invisible results

The last couple of weekends, I've been out planting seeds in the garden and in pots. There's not a lot to show for it yet in the garden, though.

After hours of weed removal, compost spreading and seed sowing, all you can really see is bare ground. The lovely large and healthy line of chard on the right is from last year and is fairly soon going to have to go to make way for this year's crop in my crop-rotation scheme. It's got until June when I'll need the space for tomatoes. I've planted all of my root vegetable, alliums and lettuce and about half my brassicas. It took much longer than I was expecting as well, possibly due to excessive optimism on my part. I've largely been remembering to water too, but there are no signs of life yet.

The only first shoots of growth from this year's outdoor sowing are in my legumes. I've finally planted out the broad beans. I start them off in pots, as my experience says that there's nothing my slugs and snails like better than the first broad bean leaves and the pots put them off. This week, though, I deemed them large enough to risk the open ground.

My mangetout are coming up too:

I grow mangetout instead of peas because my peas tend to get pea moths and quickly become inedible. This doesn't affect the mangetout stage and also you don't have to shell mangetout, which is a definite bonus. These could theoretically have gone straight in the ground. I've never noticed a particular snail problem with these. But I don't yet have room, as I'm still harvesting my purple sprouting broccoli, which is taking up the space they will eventually fill. Initially I was disappointed with the purple sprouting broccoli as a plant, but I think that was simply because I didn't realise how long I was going to have to wait for it. It's been producing for about a month or so now and I've had a decent amount of veg from it that tastes every bit as good and tender as the shop-bought stuff. The trick is to keep harvesting, then it keeps coming. Oh, and also to kill the bugs if your plant gets an infestation.

I'm also growing additional seedlings both indoors and in the greenhouse. The ones in the picture are my kohl rabi. I've got tomatoes, chillies and peppers coming up indoors.

The other things that have been growing already have had little to do with this year's planting and more to do with lucky decision-making in previous years. My raspberries are pushing up new shoots. I love them so much. They grow like weeds, produce a huge amount of fruit and only need me to pick the fruit, cut them back at the end of the year and dig them up and gift them to friends when they stray out of their allotted area. Oh, and a bit of weeding around them too I suppose, although they can easily compete with my weeds if I don't bother. Best food plant ever.

The climbing white roses planted along our back fence have produced a ton of leaves and new growth. They've definitely survived being planted in the shade and have grown so tall that parts of them now enjoy full sun.

And our new red climbing rose to climb all over the house is also looking like it's settled in happily too, with the arrival of plentiful new leaves.

Overall, the gardening year has well and truly started, but it'll be a while before I see the fruits of quite a lot of my labours.

Spring has sprung and now the work begins

Spring has arrived with all its crazy weather and the start of all the fun (=work) in the garden. These photos were both taken on the same day (17 March), blazing sunshine and rapid hail:

It took quite a lot of work to get the garden into the neat condition you see in the photos. It was previously covered in small weeds and a lot of foliage was hanging over the fence from next door. This weekend I had a major clear out and then we took three over-stuffed tubs full of hard, twiggy garden waste to the tip – or the recycling and reuse centre, as it likes to call itself nowadays. And indeed, it deserves that name. It turns the garden waste people bring it into compost. The compost is then all piled up in a big shipping container with shovels for putting it into your own container. You're allowed up to 4 bags of it per day. So I filled up half of one of the tubs we brought the garden waste in – I didn't want to be greedy. It looks like good stuff and it definitely doesn't damage the peat bog habitat, which is an extra bonus. I'm going to see if I can grow seedlings in it with some of my more plentiful seeds and if not, I'll just strew it over my soil.

I've done a lot of work in the garden this weekend, but I haven't got as far as I would have liked. In addition to getting rid of the weeds and branches overhanging the fence, I've also now planted my tomatoes and chillies to germinate on the dining room table. The dining room table is the perfect spot for this, as it gets more sun than anywhere else in the house. I'm a little later than I'd like to have been, but when I tried to make a start last weekend, I discovered that my compost, which had overwintered in an open bag in the greenhouse, was crawling with little black flies. I think an identical little black fly must have laid its eggs in it. Obviously I couldn't bring that into the house, so we tried to drive to the garden centre for new compost. Unfortunately the road to the garden centre had been temporarily closed and we didn't manage to work out how to get round it. Still, I managed to buy some this weekend (actually from B&Q in the end, as they had much better value peat-free compost), and I've even filled the watering can up with water, so that it can warm up to room temperature. When you're growing chillies, even tiny advantages like room-temperature water help.

Apart from that, I've also planted some mangetout in pots. They should really have gone straight in the ground, but my purple-sprouting broccoli has only recently become productive and I want to enjoy it for a little while longer before I clear the ground to make room for the peas. I  haven't done as well with the purple-sprouting broccoli as I would have liked. Pigeons love it, like they love all brassicas and have pecked a lot of it off.

It's also had quite a few little grey bugs of some sort infest it. Nevertheless, I've so far managed to get five portions out of it, with more still expected. It's less than an ideal amount for the number of plants I grew, but better than nothing. And cutting it encourages it to grow more, so I might yet be lucky, if it's not too late in the season.

In other news, when we did finally make it to the garden centre this weekend, we bought another climbing rose for the back garden. The ones at the far end of the garden are white, to make the most of their dark position. This one, which is intended to grow up and over the log store and then cover the back of our white-painted house, is red to stand out against the white background. The name of the rose we picked is Etoile de Hollande. It's going to be huge and covered in fragrant red roses in June/July and then again in September. I imagine it will take a couple of years to get as far as the house, but the first blooms and the fragrance should be with us this year already.

It's not going to get much light until it can make it up to the top of the log store, but it'll still get more than the iceberg climbing rose did on the back fence, so fingers crossed it can survive here until it reaches the light.