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.