a tiny garden in North East Wales

It's May, and by now our tubs and planters are usually filled with spring flowering annuals providing a riot of colour. Pansies cheerfully nodding their heads in the blustery winds that blow up and down our valley, while we wait for the summer show offs, the peonies, the clematis and of course, the roses. You may already have these flowering in your garden, but here in Wales, north Wales, the space time continuum as far as plants is concerned, is a little later than everyone else, and of course the frosts can still throw a spanner in the works!

I say usually! This is May 2020 and the World is a very different place than 2019. Here in Wales we are in lockdown although things may be easing soon. There have been no visits anywhere unless they are essential, so no trips to various garden centres for luscious plants. Indeed even sourcing stuff online has been difficult with everyone wanting everything from a workforce severely depleted due to closures, furloughs and social distancing measures.

I was fortunate to get some wild flower seeds back in April and have sown them in big tubs, pots, and pans. They are all bee and insect friendly and I hope for a colourful display soon.  For a long time we eeked out compost for potting up by combining garden soil, homemade compost and a small bag of compost from the local supermarket. We've since managed to get another large bag of general purpose compost but are rapidly running out!

We have a tiny front garden, a tiny front patio, a tiny nursery mainly nursing sick plants back to health, a tiny(ish) back garden, a bank garden, a raised bed, a septic garden and a tiny veg garden comprising homemade raised beds.  We like to reuse things for containers, recycle where we can, but our pot shed is full of plastic pots, hey, that's what most plants come in, we do reuse them constantly. All our planters are made by my husband, and we take them apart occasionally and alter the size and shape according to what we feel like displaying this year.

 Since March this year we've spent a LOT of time in the garden, potting up everything that has recovered in the tiny nursery for sick plants. Over the weeks I've been posting on Instagram highlights and lowlights from the gardens under the hashtag #aTinyGardenInNorthEastWales. Having this blog just gives me more room to expand on how much fun it is gardening on a hill in a tiny garden in North East Wales.