Potato planting

In the dry spells since returning from NZ I've managed to clear and fork over the first beds for planting up and now have the middle fabric path running the whole length of the plot.

Yesterday was a warm dry day so I decided to go for it and plant my potatoes, as the clods of recently forked soil broke down surprisingly well when raking them over.
Rather than dig trenches I made planting holes with the long handle dipper and then recovered with soil.
This seemed a quick and easy method especially as I used walk boards ,rather than a planting line, to align the rows.
I usually earth up rows from the start but this year I'll wait until the shoots emerge.

Blue Kestrel.These and some of the other varieties are planted in "wide rows" due to an over estimate in my potato seed buying.

North Island New Zealand photos

North Island New Zealand photos best viewed as full screen slideshow.

I went with my pal Andrew,who'd been with me on the trip to South Island in 2012.He features as foreground in some of the pics.
On this visit to NI I managed to reach some more remote spots in the Kaimanawa,Kaweka and Tararua mountains than I'd been to on previous trips.Lots of good tracks ,huts and scenery and quite a bit of time spent crossing and walking in rivers!

On the way back we stopped over in Hong Kong for a couple days with a friend of Andrew.It was fairly cold and misty but there were some fascinating sights.

Early March catch up

I'm just getting over jet lag after flying back from a month's holiday on North Island ,New Zealand.Photo album should appear soon.I had a 2 day stop over at Hong Kong on the way back.The weather there was quite cold after the New Zealand summer but I've returned to England bathed in warm sunshine.

There's quite a lot of colour in the garden and still some leafy veg to be had from the allotment.

When I went to Beetham Garden Centre yesterday I thought that my delay in buying any seed potatoes might have been a mistake but managed to find enough of my favourite Salad Blue (30 ) plus sufficient quantities of Shetland Black , Nadine , Orla , Premiure and Blue Kestrel.They all seem to be chitting nicely.

 While I've used the sunny spell to plant out a few onion and shallot sets I'm trying not to get suckered into sowing anything else until the soil dries out and warms up a bit.

Late January garden

I've started to reorganise my garden in the few recent dry spells .The Autumn Bliss raspberries which I'd planted in the middle bed nearest the windows tended to block out views of the rest of the garden in the summer and autumn.So they've been moved over to the allotment.I'm gradually turning the garden into mixed beds of shrubs and shrub roses under planted with perennial flowers and bulbs.There's still a jostaberry and two gooseberry bushes occupying the two smaller upper beds and I'll see how these fit in with the overall planting scheme before deciding whether to move them across to the plot as well.

A grey squirrel has taken a particular liking to the peanut feeder ,which I've now had to protect with a cage so that the small birds stand a chance of getting their fair share of nuts.A touch of speciesism ,as I'm sure that I would encourage red squirrels to feed in my garden if we had them round here.

New forsythia ,shrub rose and feeder cage

Some winter colour