Walking the Plank

We have made great headway in the garden this week with the lovely weather, but no where near as much as we made at the weekend, when Garden Dad's parents came to help out. Prior to the weekend we had all our central raised beds installed but nothing around the edges, so Garden Dad and Grandad, helped at intervals by Garden Girl, built the remaining raised beds.

There was a lot of digging to do in order to level out the ground. Then out came the drill and saw and the garden started to look like a carpenters workshop. Garden Girl and Garden Boy, who were supposed to be helping me plant out the potatoes and lettuce, decided to spend a good part of the day entertaining themselves with the planks of wood. Garden Girl walked the plank over and over again while Garden Boy crawled after her with a big grin. It wasn't long before Garden Dad's Mum was forced to walk the plank too. They then discovered that the long planks of wood were resting on a little hummock, which made it bounce at the ends. Garden Girl tried to pretend that it was a see saw until she decided it wasn't bouncing high enough, so it was back to walking the plank. While my little helpers were so happily engaged I managed to fill the allotted section of the raised beds with potatoes and lettuce. I ran out of room for all of the potatoes so will have to get hold of some potato sacks for the remaining seed potatoes. I don't want to waste them and we tried three seed potatoes in sacks last year, courtesy of Auntie C, and they did OK, despite being the target of a slug attack.

Garden Girl and Garden Boy had a birthday party to attend in the afternoon, so the three of us were excused from the hard work of digging over the next section of the raised beds and spent a lovely afternoon running around Garden Friends garden. When we returned Garden Girl started to help build the raised beds and was put in charge of the decking screws. She counted out the right number and passed them to Grandad when he needed them. Later, after observing Grandad at work she started to put them in the right holes. So proud was she of her new role she did not want to relinquish the screws when it was time to head indoors.

By the end of the day the left hand raised bed was completed. The back bed was built, but not yet installed, as the ground still needs levelling. This is the last bed to complete so hopefully we will finish this soon, but the headway we made at the weekend means we can get planting as soon as the soil has been dug over. We were outside again tonight till it became too dark to see, so I am hopeful that by this weekend the seed packets will once again be out of the cupboard.