How does your garden grow? Veggie patch & outdoor fun

_{Some items have been gifted}

Oh what a lovely weekend this is proving to be. The weather has been glorious and yesterday I spent the whole day in the garden with my husband. We listened to the radio as we tended to our plants and had a thorough weeding session to bring the veggie patch back up to scratch, followed by a well deserved drink and lunch in the garden. I gave you an update on how our strawberries were getting on in their DIY makeshift planter earlier this week and today I’m happy to report a little bit of growth in the raised beds too. All of a sudden the carrot seeds that we planted along the front of the bed are finally sprouting up and the runner beans are running up the canes. Even the gooseberry bush that we planted last year is getting bigger and bushier!

You may have spotted two excellent runner bean plants in the photos and two that are still really small. That’s because we originally planted some peas on the left which, although they produced a few decent pods, didn’t climb very high and eventually withered and died. Our first semi-fail of the year. However, we decided to replace these with some more runner bean plants and are hoping that these will grow up just as well as the first batch. I’m looking forward to a staggered harvest of the beans later in the year. Last year, the beans were ready all at once because they were all planted at the same time. This meant that we ended up with a lot of beans in the freezer and some that ‘hid’ on the underside of the plant which ended up going to waste. This year I’m hoping we’ll be able to eat fresh beans all summer long with our unintentional staggered planting. Anyway, what better way to reward our hard work than by enjoying lunch in the garden and having a nice long rest in the afternoon? My brother bought us a vintagey drinks dispenser a couple of weeks ago and we’ve finally tested it out for the first time with a big mix of ginger beer and soda – yum!

This is also the first time we’ve used our table and chairs in the garden. Mum picked up this table from the car boot sale for us and it’s exactly the right size for four people. It’s obviously been used in someone else’s garden for years and had layers of paint peeling off, but I kind of like how it looks. Some people would pay a fortune for a ‘distressed’ look like that!

We got four metal garden chairs from Asda last month which are the same shade of blue as my caravan. I thought I could use one in my caravan as my sewing chair when it’s not being used in the garden and they are really study so are much more suitable for outdoor use than taking my dining chairs outside when I want to enjoy an al fresco dinner. I love the little wildflower meadow area in the garden. Even though it looks cute and like we might have made a conscious decision to welcome wild life into our garden, it is in fact completely unintentional – we just didn’t get round to mowing the space for a while. Now it is over-run with leggy buttercups, daisies and gorgeous lilac grasses.

My husband mowed a little patch in the centre of the grass so that we could get into it and now it’s the perfect area for our table and chairs. I actually want to sprinkle some more wild flower seeds in this area and see how it develops throughout the year so watch this space! Let me know what you’ve been up to your garden this weekend – leave me a comment or tweet me @cassiefairy.

Some items in this blog post have been gifted to me and the pink links indicate a gifted product, affiliate link or information source. All thoughts and opinions in this post are based on my own experience and I am not responsible for your experience 🙂