How does your garden grow?

Every year, around about this time, I excitedly publish a post detailing my grand garden plans for the summer. In fact I've already started this year, with a post about the work that I've done to our summer house. The trouble is that I do struggle a bit in the garden, the children aren't particularly interested in helping me and they aren't always the best at occupying themselves while I get on with things. It's much easier now that I can trust them enough to turn my back on them for a few minutes at a time, but I still find it difficult to carve out a decent amount of time to get something done.

I was a bit lazy at the end of last summer and never properly cleared out our vegetable patch. It's tucked away behind our garage so I can't see it from the house and it's easy to ignore. So for months I had been able to forget about this, lurking away:

But since the weather has been so lovely for the last week or two and we've been out in the garden (we've even enjoyed our few barbecues of the year!) it's been impossible to ignore, so over the weekend I announced that I was going to get it weeded. It was hard work, we had grown some pretty impressive weeds and there was a big patch of nettles by the fence that come through from the green space beyond. There is still more to do, like taming the large climbing plant gradually coming over from next door that I need to prevent from swallowing up the garage, and the planters still need a bit of work.

I'm pretty chuffed with what I managed to get done though, and I only had to stop because our green bin was stuffed full, along with extra waiting in bags to go out over the next few weeks.

Every year I usually manage to grow some tomatoes, and this year Harry was desperate to get started with planting, especially after I printed him out this fab Planting Tomato Seeds Fact Sheet (Twinkl subscriber resource) from Twinkl. I had some ancient tomato seeds which we planted together over Easter with our fingers firmly crossed, and although they took a while to get going it looks as though we'll have a few plants to pot out soon. I usually have some success with spinach and carrots, and my Dad has some other vegetable plants for me too.