Whoops I did it again

Don't worry I haven't developed a love of old Brittany Spears tunes, the title just references the fact that after promising to keep my blog up to date, I disappeared into the ether again. 

2016 was an odd year in the patch for various reasons. For the first time since I started my garden, I have had a lot of trouble trying to get things to grow, trays of various seeds failed to produce anything in the spring and the fact that it was so cold and wet didn't help. Broad beans took 3  attempts, french beans the same, Zinnias, which I have never had any trouble with 4 goes and the final batch have produced about 6 very sorry looking plants. I was beginning to despair that I would end up with nothing, then finally in July it warmed up a bit and things began to grow. 

All of the disappointment and work which came to nothing, has made me rethink how I use my patch and I have come to a decision.. I started the garden with a view to growing as much as our own veg as possible, but since then, I got myself mixed up with a very lovely group of flower growers and I find that they have become my first love. With this in mind and the fact that last summer I hurt my back quite badly and have had a lot of trouble keeping on top of things, I have decided to turn all but 2 of my bed over the growing flowers. 

I am currently enjoying researching as many perennial flowery varieties that I can find, that I know will give me the cut flowers that I adore. I also have already acquired a nice selection of Dahlia and have chosen 4 lovely roses from David Austen The beds will be a lot more organised than in previous years with all the right sizes planted together. 

I am still planning on cutting them though. This isn't going to be a nice garden to look at and not enjoy the spoils of. I will still grow a bit of veg in the remaining two beds but only easy stuff that can look after itself. 

The original raised beds that we made from old scaffold boards are all rotten through and so over the winter I have been replacing them . This also gives me the opportunity to make them a bit smaller as the first time round, despite Jim's advice , I made them too big and the middle of each bed was always wasted as I couldn't reach it. This is how the patch looked when it was originally designed. 

And finished today after a huge amount of work, all by me, I have built and put in place 10 new beds. The path between each bed has been made narrower as they were previously too wide and wasted precious growing space . 

This is what those old scaffold board beds look like now..

Rotten, but now replaced by these lovely sturdy beds I got from Harrod Horticultural . They all need a nice layer of compost and I have two tons of topsoil being delivered on Tuesday to fill them right up 

And to finish off pictures of my early cutting beds with tulip, narcissi and calendula already being cut for the house .