A very busy day planting seeds, re-potting seedlings and watering! The sun even came out!
Squashes have gone in as have another bed of beetroot and some more potatoes.
Due to the warmer weather over the last week things are starting to look very green. Our first potatoes are bursting out of the ground and the red onion sets have finally caught up with the white onions.
The rhubarb is ready to pull so when we will be ready to make our first chutney of the year very soon!

In the afternoon we had visit from Cllr Shimmin who had heard all about us but had not visited before.
All in all a great day.

It has been a glorious day at the Garden! The sun was out and sky was blue. We even got some work done.
 
It is amazing how after a little heat the plants respond so positively! We now have potato leaves properly out of the ground, the onion leaves have got longer and longer, plus the beetroot is looking on fine form.

We also spent part of the day digging out the grass from around the bottom of the trees in the orchard and surrounding them with wood chip. We'll do a few each week as it is really hard work.

We closed up a little early to be able to join in with the St George's Day celebrations up the town. Whilst we were in town we donated one of the hanging baskets to the Leatherhead Museum to brighten up their garden :)

Fun and games were had in the Garden as we met for the first Saturday in April. Lots of digging over of beds and planting potatoes plus getting stuck in old tyres (check out the photos)...! 

On top of that we built an outdoor run for our two baby/teenage chickens. They will be out in this run until it is time to eat them! This run was also made with another purpose in mind. It is the same width as our planting beds which allows us to put it on top of the soil during the autumn to allow the chickens to do the hard work of digging up the soil, removing the leaves and adding nutrients to the soil (in other words adding chicken manure straight from source!)

After waiting for all our regular children to arrive at the Garden we started our first Easter egg hunt!
One hundred and seventy mini eggs were hidden throughout the orchard and garden, of which all were found except one (was it eaten!!?). It took the kids about half an hour to get them all. We then followed this chocolate theme up with making hot chocolates with marshmallows and cream. 
Phil also had baked some eater bunny shaped bread for everyone to munch on. Check out the photos! Some said they looked more like unhappy hamsters!

Also the "baby" chickens made another appearance down the Garden, this time weighing a fair amount and looking far less cute!

Look what we found! Areial photographs of the Garden courtesy of Bing Maps. These must have been taken the early part of 2012 as there is no cabin, no fruit cage, no orchard plus the new fencing was going up

Yay for Easter Hats!


After all the helpful children re-potted the wildflowers with Pat, their spent the rest of the day making Easter hats and drinking hot chocolate. Event the adults had to make a hat!


They were all very colourful and exciting! Looking forward to wearing them next week at the start of the Easter school holidays :)

Great turn out! All the regulars turned up including the return of the Tanner clan! 
What a great bunch of people to make it out in the wind and rain and then really work their socks off :D

We are very lucky to have our volunteers!!
Planted out three rows of beetroot (indoors), six rows of onions, started some tomatoes and even began planting up herb hanging baskets ready for Ashtead Village Day. Then we tried making some more willow hearts. Really needed to harvest some fresh willow first as it kept snapping.
We have a lonely daffodil in the Garden! Just the one, by itself. Hopefully we'll have some flowers bursting through soon to brighten up the Garden.

What a fantastic day to meet the families of West Hill School!
We had three activities on offer for both adults and children to get involved with and the weather just about held off.
We made pine cone bird feeders, paper pots with beans and learnt how to take lots of cuttings to make new plants.
On top of all of that we had two baby chickens and a guinea pig to hold!

Spent today putting out our first lot of potatoes. We usually plant them outside in old car tires to protect them and make it easy to harvest them once they are done. This year we thought we would try growing them like the farmers do. We made a furrow in the soil and planted 10-12 potatoes all in a row, covered them up and watered them. Now when they start to grow we will have to push up the surrounding soil to make potato pyramids to keep the developing spuds undercover.
We also turned the compost and found lots of extra worms to help with the decomposing process. And we did the first lawn mow of the season to which the grass clippings ended up in the compost bin too.
Lastly we had added a new storage shelf and did a big tidy up in prep for the Family Learning Day next week (9th March 2013). During the tidy up we managed to dig up three forgotten parsnips which was a lovely surprise :)

In addition to all of this we had two special guests at the Garden..... Two of the baby chicks we went to visit earlier on in the week (see post below) came to visit the Garden!

Susan and Honey the Chickens took a trip to a local school to visit all the Year 2 children who had successfully hatched ten eggs. 
Here is a picture of Susan with one of those week old chicks. They are of the same breed. I can't believe that our chickens were ever that small!