The battle of the weeds continues

It's definitely spring and heading fast into summer. The weather has been glorious - sunny balmy weather with sprinkles of rain just often enough to put every growing thing into overdrive. As a result, the crabgrass, nettles, ivy and other weeds are all relentlessly advancing across the garden. The last few days has been a pretty solid fight, armed with handfork, trowel and large amounts of bark chipping to get the majority of the main areas under control. We've weeded, turned soil and laid out over 5 cubic metres of bark chips - and planted lots of new plants.

As weeding is not the most photographic activity, I haven't really blogged much about it. But here are a few pictures of the end result. I'm hoping that in a few weeks, after a bit more of this, I will have an extra special end result and have lost a few pounds! It's certainly looking pretty good on W - I think I need to do some catching up with him on the heavy lifting.

I'm also really looking forwards to the middle of the summer when all the little pots planted will be much larger and have jumped on the springtime explosion-wagon.

The other joy of spring is all the fruit trees bursting into flower - we have a wonderful display on the main pear tree which is a lovely sight of an evening. All the trees in the orchard have survived the winter flooding - we worried for a while that we'd lost a couple due to having their roots in water for too long when the field drain blocked and flooded the fields. The flowers are coming out in their own pattern - the cherries have bloomed first, and the apples are following along closely.

The crab apples are gorgeous - I'm counting on them to bring us our first crop of fruit this summer as they are excellent pollinators for all our apple varieties. Roll on the summer!