Spring is sprung

As the days have got longer and warmer, the time to head back to the plot has arrived. Julia and I did a couple of hours faffing today, tackling the compost heap in particular. When we took over the garden, this was the compost heap:



The nearest compartment is full of decent crumbly composty-goodness, but the farther compartment is devil-spawn grass-slime. To get the latter to the state of the former would take work, careful adding of suitable 'brown' carbons, and a bit of space. Today we created that space by digging out the decent compost and using it to mulch the raspberries and to add organic material to another couple of beds. In terms of compost grass-spawn-slime, there's still hard work and carbons needed, but what we did today looks pretty damn good, if we do say so ourselves:

Once our flabby muscles gave up, whinging from the hard work, we headed off to Julia's house to do some plantin'. Very exciting it was, and included broad beans, peas, beetroot, carrots, sweetcorn, perpetual spinach, swiss chard and a couple of 'cut and come again' salad leaf mixes. After planting them, we gave them a good couple of hours (while we drank tea, ate cakey-buns, and watched some Hugh on DVD) but there was no evidence of germination. Pah. How frustrating can this gardening mallarky be?!

Photos, as ever, here.