I helpfully suggested to Alex that he could build our berry patch this week to maintain his momentum after the end of the bed-building. The idea is to fill it with the strawberries that we’ve grown from seed, and some raspberry canes, thornless blackberries and blueberries that we’ve ordered. The internet seems divided (again!) about which of these grow well together so we will plant them all and observe. We will also plant herbs to attract bees and other beneficial insects. Alex channelled his high school woodworking teacher to turn the sawmill offcuts that came with our shed into a pretty good-looking frame. After sourcing more cardboard, we (both) filled the triangle with wheelbarrow loads of compost and made the path. By Friday we were done, and just waiting for rain to water the compost in and our berry delivery to arrive.

This week we also filled a crucial gap in our fruit trees, collecting our third pear tree. The two pears we already planted in the border don’t cross-pollinate so we also ordered a Josephine pear that cross pollinates with both. (Fortunately the nursery had a table with all of this information.) So this last pear tree is our key to future pear harvests! It’s our first time planting bare-rooted trees and hopefully it survives – and thrives. We also collected our lime tree order, which is still hiding in the tunnel with the lemon trees while we figure out where the least inhospitable location might be. It is probably beside the yet-to-be-built shed, which also advanced this week when we showed our plans to a builder.

Most of the remaining seed orders arrived this week and we (maybe only I) started becoming impatient to start planting. My planning spreadsheet, with its guesstimates of seasonal variation, suggests we should be starting seed propagation in the coming week. These will be in the laundry for a while so that they stay a little warmer. I might try sowing radish outside but not much else: thanks to my new soil thermometer I know the soil is only about 8C. The main challenge outdoors seems to be frost though. Most of the outdoor coriander seedlings from my earlier experiments were finished off by this week’s frosts (the ones under the repurposed doona cover suffered after I forgot one evening). Curiously, the caraway seedlings beside the coriander are fine (so far, at least). So the experimenting continues.