Bank holiday weekend

Half way through the bank holiday weekend and i have still lots of things to do that i had planed on fitting in, but yesterday i had a serious attack on one flower bed that had been overrun with weeds last year as i was busy with an other project in the garden that took priority mainly the re design of the south west side of the front garden which needed a lot of ground levels altering and realigning so as to support our entrance drive, it took most of my spare time during the summer months and during the winter i transferred quite a lot of plants from the bed i am now giving a serious weeding in to the new layout. Hopefully i will to get it cleaned up and finished by Monday night and ready to be able to plant out some bedding plants towards the end of the month to fill in the gaps, though today Sunday has been very wet with heavy thunder showers that started about 5/30 am and quietly rumbled on all day making our heavy soil a bit to sticky to work on but the warm moist air has really made the grass on the lawn grow and i swear our gunnera plant has grown a good 6 inches in the last 24 hours . In the veg plot the shallots have really put on some nice top growth and are looking really well. the onions and leeks on the whole are now getting established with those that were attacked by jackdaws starting to put up new leaves to replace those that were damaged with their pecking leaving only about half a dozen spaces to fill in at a later date. It has been so mild lately overnight that i have lifted most of the plants in the greenhouse outside it seems to do them good to get a nice breeze blowing through them rather than in the still muggy atmosphere of inside the greenhouse, i will just have to keep an eye out for any chance of a late frost and have to lift them back under cover if needs be.

On the farm our first cows have started calving and we are turning them out to grass for the summer as they do it is nice to see them born and sent on their way it's the start of our year really once the lambs and calves are here plus i heard a cuckoo calling Friday which is always a nice sign of the change of seasons. We managed to get the last of the N P K fertilizer spread on to the fields by Friday the price of it per tonne this year (£120 last year £280 this year) made us very careful not to waste any so we held back about 10 days longer than normal so as to be sure it was straight into action, and on Thursday coming we have about 40 acres of meadow ground to spread with lime in a high rainfall area like South Cumbria PH tends to get lower so we need to try and balance it a bit. It seems every body is having to cope with rapidly rising prices and it is going to be something we are stuck with for quite a time we have to question if we need to try a diffrent approach to all we do, if we were to reduce imputs we would have to lower the amount of food we can produce and were that to happen on a large scale it would push the price of food in the shops even more than it is now, and if grain grown for bio fuel was diverted into the food supply the price of petrol and diesel would shoot up even more, still Gordon Brown,s on the case so we don't need to worry do we.