Sunday morning.

Do you ever have one of those moments when you decide that today's the day  to dig out a flower bed and replant everything?  Today was such a day,  although the forecast had said sunshine and showers,  the sky above us was blue although cloudy to the south and north.

For some time now I've been looking despairingly at one of the beds in the side garden,  it's too close to the rotary drier,  the geraniums are enormous and usually that means they get damaged in the winter winds and rains,  and it's too close to the stuff John has accumulated outside the shed.  The gazania's are overshadowed by the geraniums and don't bloom so well without full sun.....there had to be a better place for everything.

The iris were easy to get out and find a new home for,  also the euonymus which has gone up near the pool edge where I've started a new mixed border.  A big clump of dwarf pinks - except they're red not pink - has also moved up there along with the gazanias,  a sage cutting, an offshoot from the bay tree,  something that looks like a durillo,   part of the viburnum family - viburnum tinus - and a real durillo.  The durillo looks a bit privet-ish but has very dark green small leaves.

If the bay cutting grows we'll have to keep it trimmed as it's parent is about 20 foot tall - I'm hoping for a bush not a tree! 

The biggest of the geraniums was a real awkward monster to get out.  It had rooted under the edge of supporting brickwork of the bed,  in the end I got it loose enough  to just pull  until the main taproot snapped.  It's  an old plant - it's been frozen in the past then thawed out and has regrown,  it's collapsed under the weight of snow in past years,  been cut down to a stump and regrown from that so I'm sure it'll recover from the ground wrenching removal of today.   It eventually got cut up into 3 big clumps, 2 planted out by the olive tree on the pool terrace and one has gone into a big pot.  

The ground is nice and damp from the recent rain and still quite warm from the summer sun so hopefully everything will be happy.....

The lettuce seeds certainly seem to be happy as they're all up, as are the kohlrabi which went in on the 16th,  all the peas are up and the broad beans and the potatoes.  Not many of them,  just some that had sprouted indoors.  The reseeded borlotto beans are beaning, nearly enough to start picking again and the kohlrabi from the spring sowing are still producing a couple a week.  They should have finished by now but I didn't thin them out enough and I think they've been slow to swell because of the overcrowding. 

I've started planting onion bases again -  that is when we remember to cut the bottom off  the onion before halving it!   They have started to put out shoots now,  I wrote about free onions a couple of years ago  and they started off well then and each base grew into 3 or 4 sections.   But when I divided them up they died.  So this time I'm leaving them,   better to have small onions than none at all.