The Charming Nook

I haven’t been able to blog much over the last few weeks due to a combination of poor weather on my time off and when it has been nicer, I was out enjoying the sunshine and working on other projects with the Mr.

We spent a few weekends this month when it was dry repointing the paving all around the front of our property; some of the paths had become completely overgrown with dandelions in areas and it looked a mess. It now looks much better, but it was a fairly mammoth and exhausting task for us both.

Potatoes

When I finally had some time available, I decided to plant out the potatoes I had been chitting for months on a windowsill indoors. I had been putting off planting these out due to the cold and rainy weather that had been on-going for us in the UK, but the weather has recently started to brighten up and the temperatures are warming up too.

I had planned to plant these into large vegetable planters this year, but I haven’t gotten round to that either for various reasons, so I instead just opted to use an old horse water bucket and planting bags:

The potatoes I planted out are ‘Caledonian Pearl’, which are first earlies, they are a good all-rounder for culinary purposes, they are also meant to provide a large yield and be very flavourful. I haven’t grown this variety before, so all of that remains to be seen – I am anticipating that I might not get such a large crop from them since I’ve had to plant them out later than planned.

With the intermittent rain and sunshine we have been having, they have already sprouted up and I will just keep earthing them up over the coming months:

Strawberries

The other little project was planting out strawberries that I purchased from our local garden centre. I’ve grown many strawberries in the past in other gardens, so this is nothing new to me, but I don’t think you can beat picking strawberries fresh from the garden, still warm from the sun and eaten straightaway. I will be propagating these from the runners to increase my stock over time.

The variety I am growing is ‘Elan’, which should produce medium-sized strawberries with good, sweet flavour. I planted them out in some large troughs I had going spare:

I plan on moving all of the fruit and vegetable to the top of the garden eventually, which is an area I want to use for growing produce, though I don’t have concrete plans set out yet.

Globe artichoke

I also picked up a globe artichoke bulb on offer recently – this has been something I have kept in the back of my mind that I wanted to try growing one day, after I saw someone growing the most beautiful globe artichokes amongst their flower borders and they told me how amazing the artichokes tasted.

I haven’t ever tasted fresh globe artichokes, but have watched many cooking videos with people singing the virtues of artichokes, so my interest has been well and truly piqued.

This is going to be an experiment for me, since I’ve never grown artichokes before and I am also slightly late with planting it out, so we’ll have to see if anything comes of it. Again, without my formal fruit and veg area prepared, I just planted the bulb out into a large pot and I will eventually transplant it into its final space in the future.

That’s all for now – I have been doing some other little projects I will post about soon. With the weather warming up again, hopefully it should mean there will be more gardening days to enjoy. Happy gardening 🙂