Things are actually growing in the garden!

I was quite busy over the weekend so I didn't get out in the garden much, although my parents were here on the Friday to look after the children while I was away at BritMums Live and I notice that they did do a bit of sneaky weeding! The tomatoes are looking nice and healthy now, and some of them have started to get flowers, I just need to remember to keep pinching out the side shoots.

I had a big cull of all the pots that we had in the garden, all inherited from the previous owner. I was hopeless at looking after them properly and they were mainly filled with big, dead plants. Most of the large pots were given away on Freecycle, and the rest were filled with new compost and bedding plants from a big pack of petunias that I bought. This planter had been at the top of our drive for the last three years with something dead in it, now it's looking much better with some flowers.

Amazingly out of the 24 plants that I bought only one has died so far, the poor thing was eaten by slugs so I've been putting pellets down now. We also inherited a lovely strawberry planter, the strawberries are sadly long gone but I've planted it up again with the petunias and I'll try it again with strawberries next year.

I did keep some strawberry plants alive though, and this week we harvested our first - the children love picking and eating them. As long as I look after them I do seem to have a reasonable success with growing strawberries, so I'll definitely be getting more plants.

The apple tree in our front garden is also looking good this year. Last year something must have gone wrong, perhaps it didn't get pollinated or something, because we had no apples at all. But this year we had loads of blossom and now I can see plenty of apples growing. I'm not sure what variety the apples are but they must be cooking apples because they aren't very tasty to eat raw. In the past though I've made some delicious apple cake and apple crumble from them, so I'm looking forward to trying that again this year.