No feelings of holiday wanderlust here today. Such a stunningly glorious day. Really ought to take the christmas window stickers down though!

Been out digging again today, despite reading more and more about no-dig gardening. Charles Dowding’s blog is permanently open on my phone at the moment as I try to figure out what to do with the vegetable garden and the big flowerbed at the side of the patio.

The vegetable garden and raised beds has potatoes and strawberries in that I’d possibly try to keep, and other than that it’s just nettle and dock and some kind of spikey grass type thing.

The big flowerbed has rhubarb, azaleas, several invasive mint varieties, possibly sage (need to have a smell) which is pretty overgrown, and some other clumping perennials which are just starting to shoot. And it is also full of dock, nettle, ground elder, dandelions, and grasses.

Rhubarb looks like it is wearing 1920’s flapper hats today!

Seriously why do some plants die if you even breathe wrongly, and others you just cannot get rid of ever?! At least this mint smells wonderful, I’m sure I’ll be regretting letting it live uncontained at some point though.

I’ve started digging up the dock because although it’s welcome at the edges of the garden I don’t want it in either the vegetable garden or the big flowerbed, I’m pulling up nettles as I go because one sting from them on any of the children and it’ll take weeks to persuade them out again, and as unbothered as I am to have dandelions in the main garden again I don’t want them in the flowerbed because I want that bed to be edibly productive.

The kids have also been outside playing but Ben and Charley are struggling with something and have not been their usual selves, so it’s been a mildly trying day constantly trying to unpick arguments. That said, Charley remembered a parcel had arrived yesterday which needed investigating and it turned out (to their delight) to be a parcel of new Crayola felt-tips and pencil crayons and wax crayons which they all dived straight into! Ben likes the strength and finality of felt-tips, Charley prefers the gentleness of pencil crayons, and I can clean Erika’s wax crayons off most stuff!!