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We’ve had a cracking weekend in Glasgow - both Saturday and Sunday saw unbroken blue skies.

On Saturday, we went down the Clyde Valley to get a few plants in the garden centres (tomatoes, peppers etc), then we had a great circular 7.5 mile walk starting and finishing at New Lanark. Most of the walk was in t-shirts, followed by ice cream at the end.

On Sunday we spent a bit of time in the garden. I’m experimenting with a new technique called Square Foot Gardening, that splits the vegetable garden into 1 square foot sections, to enable better planning, succession planting, plant spacing and usability of the veg plot. I’ve started with some broad beans, in four 4×4 squares.

Only another 75 squares to go! I’m hoping that Square Foot Gardening will help me to be better organised, and to have less wasted space in our limited veg plot. I’ll keep making posts here through the summer.

The broad beans (variety=Sutton) we planted on 6th March are now “little aliens”, having sprouted in the last day or two, poking their little alien heads above the compost. These are a short (40cm) variety, and they worked really well as a bean hedge last year.

Other work in the garden today:

• Planted Dunluce potatoes in the first potato barrel.
• Potted up some strawberry runners that had self-propogated in front of the greenhouse.

To compensate for Ireland losing to France, spent Sunday afternoon in the garden liberally scattering Marshall’s Organic Farmyard Manure and Silver Birch Mushroom Compost. The garden now stinks (so we apologise to the neighbours).

Seeds in the greenhouse are doing well - the sweet peas are well on, today we just spotted the first “little alien” of a broad bean, and the rocket in the drainpipe has just started to grow.

Spring has sprung. Weather forecast is for warmer but wetter weather. Maybe it’s time for war on slugs…

Managed to get out into the garden for a while yesterday, in between darting indoors to watch Ireland’s scrappy victory over England in the rugby.

The irises are in full bloom, both blue and purple varieties.

We planted our new pear tree, and sowed peas, broad beans, sweet peas, antirhinums, anemones and lilies. The greenhouse is now getting full, particularly with the heated propagator.

We dug these potatoes from two of our potato towers this afternoon. We had planted them on 23 August 2004, thinking it might be nice to have new potatoes by Christmas, but somehow never got round to lifting them.

Twenty-four potatoes (weighing 400 g) from an August planting of 12 tubers is probably not a brilliant success rate, but it’s nice to be able to lift new potatoes in February - it really feels like Spring is on the way.

P.S. Just eaten some of the spuds for tea. V. good.