This is what it all comes down to – planting out the garden!  Slowly and steadily bare earth is replaced with small green seedlings that within a matter of weeks will become a verdant flourishing space. 

Those early days of spring when it was still cold and a tad miserable are just memories of coaxing tiny seeds into life.  The arrival of every tiny green shoot was celebrated and now as the plants are popped into the soil, it seems impossible to believe they were ever that small.  But looking forward it will be difficult to remember they were ever as small as they are right now!

I hope this long weekend has bought you a lot of gardening joy.

Turning to a little bit of business…  with the end of the last Mini Challenge, we have a new one to get excited about.  For this next one we want to hear about your best top five gardening tips.   But interestingly we want to know why they are your top tips – did you learn them the hard way or is it the way it has always been done in your family with great result?  Or did you set up an experiment in your garden  and was able to determine what works well and what doesn’t?   The great thing about gardening is there is no wrong way to do something – if it works for you!   And it is always better to learn from the mistakes of others, so you don’t have to repeat them yourself. 

There is a fabulous prize pack up for grabs for 3 lucky winners.  This is a enter once challenge, but you have plenty of time to come up with a fabulous post.  It starts today and goes until the 13th November.  We’ll get the tick box button changed on the blog creation page as soon as we can so there is no hurry.  You can find out more about it over on the What’s going on page – >Click Here<.

The winners of the last mini challenge will be announced during the week – so keep an eye on the What’s going on page… and I’ll do an update blog post too…  You certainly haven’t made it easy for the Yates team to decide the winners. 

In my garden I have had a wonderful weekend, although not a lot of it has been in the garden at this point.   The first few days have been spent in celebration and holiday mode.  I had a big birthday this year and had a lovely time with some special friends and the weather couldn’t have been nicer.  So, we did a lot of relaxing in the sun and spending time down on the beach.  We had the perfect glimpse of summer.  I expect there will be another dodgy patch between now and the real summer, but it was nice to see what was possible.    Today is my garden day and I’m pleased I have waited as there is a bit of cloud cover, so my seedlings won’t be settling in under the glare of full sun!    I can’t wait to get stuck in.

Have a wonderful week in the garden and I hope your plants settle in well.  If you haven’t planted anything yet, don’t worry there is still plenty of time.

Happy Gardening.

Sarah the Gardener  : o)

Images:  relaxing; celebrating; a garden load of seedlings waiting to be planted and my tomato structure waiting for tomatoes