Digging up more lawn

With some beautiful weather (I have the sunburn to prove it) and no big plans beyond watching poor Andy lose again to Novak, the weekend was time to get stuff done in the garden. I'd always intended to have the front garden's border extend fully along the wall, not least because the patch of lawn remaining there was hard to mow and particularly weed infested. I also had a bunch of cosmos and marigold plants which I'd grown from seed which needed somewhere to go. Here's the end result:

Hopefully they'll survive the slugs, despite the dire warnings from our neighbour. The blue/purple flowers growing in the wall are a happy accident, no idea what they are but I'll leave them there.

Further down the same border in the part I made last year, the foxgloves and nigella are looking particularly good at the moment:

And in other news, I picked my first home-grown strawberry, a honeoye. Sadly the Cambridge Favourite in the bottom of the planter seem to have died - not sure if that's from over-watering, lack of sunlight, or they just got too damaged from their traumatic pre-planting time - I'd put them in the plastic 'greenhouse' which got blown over by the big storm this spring. Maybe I'll get some runners from the others and re-plant.

And this is them now ...

Last year, my first attempt at growing veg, I just had a single 4 foot by 4 foot raised bed. It wasn't enough. This year, after using my best persuasive  powers and despite grumbling about reduction of valuable lawn space, there are two.

Roughly using the square foot method, though using slightly bigger squares - the square-16-inch method? - growing medium is garden centre compost and vermiculite, with some poultry manure and garden centre farmyard manure mixed in.

In the original bed, we have sweetcorn (lark), french beans (ferrari and, somewhat eaten by slugs, amethyst), and summer purple broccoli with some carrots (nantes) as a catch crop around them. There are also runner beans (equator) and climbing french beans (cosse violette) planted around the bamboo canes, but not germinated yet. You may also have noticed the potatoes in sacks which seem to be growing astonishingly well, some just starting to flower.

And in the new bed we have far too much lettuce (lollo rosso), probably too much rocket which is already starting to bolt, spinach which germinated very haphazardly, carrots (flyaway and chantenay) which were also a bit haphazard, some totally non-germinating parsnips surrounded by far more successful radishes which are getting close to being ready to eat already, and along the back with my lovingly hand-crafted bamboo-cane-and-string support structure are peas (ruthless and onward).

The netting is all part of my constant battle to stop cats and foxes from destroying it all. They do like to dig.

Hello

My second year of properly gardening, and it's time to start keeping a better record. This was one of my raised beds back in April when I started planting seeds. There's also a second raised bed for vegetables, various borders with various bulbs and bushes, the occasional tree, some container-growing strawberries and neighbour-donated tomatoes. We'll see how it goes.