Love my garden

 It's a dull drizzly day so no gardening or washing today, at least it's not cold although it's quite windy, as usual.  Mixed weather forecast over the weekend, with Monday being a bright sunny day by the looks of things, so we might go to the boot sale, they hold it on bank holiday Mondays as well as the normal Saturdays.

The first thing I do when I get out of bed in the mornings is pull back the curtains and have a look at the garden, I have a lovely view over our back garden, husband has a nice view of the front garden where the bright yellow wallflowers are now in bloom.  Lots of the perennial shrubs and flowers I planted last year and the year before are now bursting into life, growing strongly and will soon fill out and bloom all summer.  We now have 6 trees along our border fence - 3 Ceanothus, different varieties, 2 blue and 1 white.  A green acer we already had in another part of the garden, now moved to a large pot beside the fence, it looks happy so doesn't seem to have minded being moved.  A tall bushy tree that will have pretty white clematis-type flowers, I can't remember what it's called.  And now a Magnolia Susan (my birth name....well, Susan, not Magnolia!), gorgeous deep pinky purple flowers, I bought it yesterday.  My lovely Mum bought one for me about 20 years ago, we had it in our front garden up in the Midlands, we couldn't bring it with us when we moved down here to Somerset as it had grown too big to dig up, I was very sad about that so am happy to have another one, it'll remind me of my Mum.  So once all these trees start to grow upwards and fill out more, which they're already starting to do, we'll have a lot more privacy.  

The veg raised beds are coming along nicely too, as I said the other day we already have shallot sets growing well in one raised bed, spuds in several old compost bags (we always grow them in bags, they do pretty well), carrot seeds sown in another raised bed.  We have little yellow and green courgette plantlets and tomato seedlings under cover in the car port, waiting to go out when the danger of frost is past.  Husband will be sowing climbing French beans into another raised bed early next month, and we'll buy some mini cucumber plants then as well.  The strawberry plants are coming to life, and the blackcurrant bush we were given by our neighbour last year is growing strongly, I love blackcurrants so am hopeful of fruit this year.

I'm beginning to really love our garden, it's going to look so good (and be so productive food-wise) this summer.  It's come a long way from the sea of gravel and very neglected roses and a few shrubs when we moved in.  I'm also so glad we got rid of the 3 horrible half dead leylandii trees that were in the middle of the garden, they weren't very tall but were very wide and took up loads of space and were so ugly, that was one of the first jobs we did in the garden.

The garden was obviously loved at one time by the previous tenant, but she eventually became too unwell to take care of it and her partner did nothing, he had no interest in the garden according to our neighbours.