It was a nice and sunny day. A perfect day to spend in the backyard. There were quite a few chores that needed to be done.

Raspberry shoots

In a border on one side of the garden I have a couple of raspberry plants. Although I have cut it back thoroughly it always produces loads of new shoots. The roots can travel long distances in the ground and pop up everywhere. Near my raspberry plants I have a blueberry bush, but the raspberry shoots are overgrowing the spot of the blueberry.
So I had to remove them from there.

Every year I dig out a couple of the shoots and cut them from the root of the main plant. We've made a lot of people happy by giving them a small raspberry plant. There are quite a few backyards that have offspring from our bush.
I've placed the shoots in small containers. I'll try to make them grow a bit larger and will try to find some more people that also want a raspberry.
The bush delivers loads of sweet raspberries for months in the summer, so who doesn't want that?

Vegetable garden

On the other side of the garden I have reserved a spot where I can grow some vegetables. Last year I planted some zucchinis, string beans, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes and lettuce. Due to the extremely wet first months of 2024 there was a slug infestation. There were literally dozens of slugs in my garden every day. Except for some tomatoes, all crops were eaten by these bastards 😒

Another year, another chance. So I have been growing some vegetables from seeds again.
This year I have cucumbers, beans and cherry tomatoes again. And also some beet root and a watermellon.
I had planted most of the seeds in one container, but the plants have been growing quite quickly in the last two weeks, so I had to give them their own containers, so they could continue growing roots without growing into eachother (both above as underground).

I scooped the plants out one by one. Most of them developped quite a lot of roots already. I even had to untangle the roots of the beans since they were growing in all directions already. It is good that I removed them since they might prevent the much smaller tomatoes next to them from growing.

After had removed all the beans and cucumbers I moved them back inside. I think I will start hardening the beans in the coming weeks since they are quite big already. I'll make a tower of bamboo sticks where they can grow onto.

While moving my tiny vegetables into their container something weird happened. I have a large bucket of garden soil in my backyard which I used to fill up the containers.
When I grabbed a hand of soil to fill up a container I was shocked to feel something moving. When I looked in the bucket I noticed a large toad that had dug himself in.

Luckily there is a pond nearby, so I took the toad there and realeased him near the water. With a few hops he swam away.

After that I had to remove the weeds from the spot where I'm going to plant my vegetables. Over the past months a lot of weeds showed up.

It was quite a job removing them all by hand. I do have a hoe, but I want to remove the weeds with their roots included. If you don't do that you have a bigger chance they will return very quickly.
And it's just a couple of square meters, so not that labour intensive.

After removing all the weeds I drove to the garden center to buy a couple of bags of compost because the soil could use some extra nutrients.
Well, that spot is ready for some vegetables now.

In the garden center I also bought some lavendar plants for the 'middle garden'. These lavendar plants just smell so good. With the backdoor open we could smell them indoors; lovely!
These also stay green in winter, so the garden will not look that sad in winter again.

I'm always so amazed how quickly things grow in spring. This was a photo of my gardenupdate of two weeks ago:

There were the first signs of my Oxeye plants peeking above the ground. And look at them now, two weeks later! The leaves are about 10 centimeters and they are 25 centimeters tall. This plant will grow about 100 - 130 centimeters tall and the leaves will grow huge. It will grow beautiful large yellow flowers that attract loads of insects every year.
This year I will try to collect the seeds from the flowers in fall to see if I can multiply these beautiful plants.

That was it for this time. Stay tuned for another #gardenupdate soon.