The month of May.

It has been a very busy month here at the Greener dream.  We managed to finally get the window into the shed wall and now we are blessed with light in a space that has been completely dark since we moved in five years ago. All we have to do now is go through all the boxes of stuff that have accumulated in there and then we will have a nice work and storage space. We are planning to put in a new door as well with glass panels and one more window, so that even more light can flood into the space.

In the garden growth has been phenomenal and we went from a very cold start to a warm ending of the month of May. Many of our vegetables found their way to final positions in the beds and we are looking forward to the months ahead, when we can “shop” for dinner in the garden instead of in the supermarket. One benefit of growing your own is that you can get different varieties and crops that are seldom for sale in a shop, such as runner beans, cucamelons, purple mange tout and ginger mint.

It looks like we will have lots of berries and fruit as well. Flowers are abundant and create drifts of colour throughout the land.

Blueberry flowers.

Everything is growing well around our main circle. Here you can see it in four directions.

East

South

West

North

Last month we helped our friend the blacksmith with adding small sections of bottle wall to his forge. You can read about it here. This past week it was time to pay him a visit and add a splash of colour to the space. We used Vitreail translucent glass paint after washing the inside ends of the bottles with methylated spirits. This removes any grease and impurities and helps the paint adhere satisfactorily.

It is getting very sun-baked in the garden now, after a week of very warm and dry weather and we will head straight out to the garden to water our small vegetable seedlings after this blog post is written and uploaded.

Our experiment with using wood chips as a mulch on top of sheep’s wool is proving very successful so far and there has been very little slug damage to our young and tender plants. We can only wait and see how everything will fare later on in the season. So far it has greatly reduced the need for watering as the mulch keeps the soil underneath nice and moist for prolonged periods of time.