Cleaning up the tunnel.

The last few day I have spend tidying up the tunnel, the strawberry beds were overgrown, the tunnel pathways carpeted with suckers.

It's nice to see a cleaned bed.

I cleaned up each plant removed dozens of suckers and the beds were given a top dressing of good garden compost. It's a job I should have done last autumn but never got round to.

Quite a few of the plants already have blossom, so we might have a nice early crop.

We grow a lot of strawberries, we have four beds in total, three in the tunnel and one outside as we refuse to buy imported strawberries which are sold all year round, out of season mostly, and totally flavourless. Besides eating the fresh fruit I make quite a bit of strawberry jam and they also bottle well.
We decided we would increase the number of plants this year, so Simon has converted an old forty gallon barrel into a strawberry planter. This barrel will take fifty plants.

After heating the plastic ease the slots out to take the plants.

Firstly he marked out where the slots would go, four inches long and six inches apart, you then drill a hole so as to be able to get a small jigsaw blade in, cut the slots.

You then heat each slot with a heat gun and using a round fencing post open up the gap.

The perforated pipe will take green waste from the kitchen. just add a handful of worms.

You also need a perforated pipe in the centre either for watering or as a worm composter, we will use it for composting with worms which should give lots of good compost for the strawberry plants. You also need a few drainage holes close to the bottom of the barrel to stop it becoming waterlogged and a good layer of gravel. I would have liked the outside of the barrel covered with gravel for aesthetic purpose, but to get the gravel to stick you have to use a lot of PVA, so it will remain white,

by the time the strawberries have grown most of the barrel should be covered anyway.

Happy looking peach tree.

The peach tree in the tunnel is covered in blooms, the most we have ever had, unfortunately there are no bees or other pollinators around so the flowers will have to be hand pollinated. Not all these flowers will be allowed to develop, they would make too much weight for the branches to hold as we found out two years ago when we lost the top third of the tree due to excess weight. The lemon tree is also a mass of blooms, maybe it's going to be a good fruit year.

Eyes left.

Eyes right.

The wild birds are all busy sorting out partners including these beautiful swans, but I've not seen any nest building yet,

however the frogs have been busy and have laid a mass of spawn in our pond,

Lots of spawn.

as we lost Daffy duck this spawn should stand a good chance of reaching maturity and bless us with lots of little frogs,  we certainly have enough slugs for them to eat.

This polyanthus is much darker than it appears in the photo. 

Each time I walk around the garden I find something new in bloom, but I do suspect that we have lost a fair few bulbs due to all the rain we have had.