Yes! Spring has arrived! The temperature here in the Netherlands have gone up. Today we're close to 20 degrees Celcius already. It's so nice to see everything starting to grow and blossom again!

It is great to spend some more time in the garden, which I have done quite frequently in the past week. I'll share some updates with you in this #hivegarden #gardenjoural for the month April!

Blossom!

We have a couple of trees in our backyard and they all start to blossom one after another. It started with our Japanese Maple, then the Almond tree followed and now it is the plum tree that has beautiful white blossom!

And after the plum the apple will be next. I alsready see the flower buds in the brenches, ready to open up and lure the bees to pollinate them. Last year we didn't have a lot of apples on our tree, but I thought I had read somewhere that you get a big harvest every other year. So I have high hopes for this year.

The garden center

Yesterday my wife and I paid a visit to the garden center. We wanted to buy some lavendar to put in our backyard, but they only had really small ones. The employee told us we'll have to wait for a couple of more weeks before they would receive some bigger plants. Lavendar seems to grow quite slowly, so we want to have slightly bigger plants to start with. I can't wait to smell the scent of the beautiful purple lavendar bushes.
But we didn't go for nothing. Last year I had some hanging baskets with strawberries. One of them didn't survive the winter, but in the other basket I did see a couple of tiny plants.
We decided to get a couple of new strawberry plants to fill up the baskets again.

Before:

I've removed the tiny plants from the basked and put them back in the basket together with the new plants. That's looking better isn't it?

After:

Another plant that didn't survive the winter was our lemon verbena. This herb smells really good. We have made quite a lot of tea from this plant last year. Since we also want this tea this year we bought another plant.

A nice cup of tea from the lemon verbena

What that did survive the winter are my mint plants. I have a couple of different species of them. When I was reorganizing my garden last week I noticed that the mint plants had already produces offspring. But, what mint plants are known for, they started to spread uncontrollably.
To prevent this from happening again I have put a couple of containers in the ground in which I planted the mint. I hope I can control them a bit better this way.

The plants are still tiny, but with all the sun and a bit of water it won't take long before we can make tea with mint flavor again.

I've also picked up a couple of bags of compost to give the center garden some extra nourishment. This is what it looks like now. The open spot on the right will be filled up with the lavendar.

I'm often so impressed how nature works. In the back of my garden I have some Oxeye plants. These plants create huge leaves and beautiful yellow flowers that attract a lot of butterflies and bees in summer. The only thing is that they are completely gone in winter. At least, that is what you think, because under the ground they are still alive. I recently noticed that there are already some small plants showing up. Can you imagine that these will be 1 meter tall and have huge leaves and flowers in just three months? Just follow my updates to see the result (or check out one of my post from last summer where you can see them too).

Monkey Jars (Nephentis)

Last year I received this cool tropical pitcher plant from my kids for my birthday. The plant attracts insects using nectar that’s secreted around the rim of the pitcher. The bright colors and scent also draw the insects in which it dissolves.
The plant had two large pitchers (about 12 centimeter tall) when I received it. As it goes with pitchers they wither after a while, so I had to cut them off.
Because there is less sun in winter the plant kind of hibernates. But the increase of sun hours and a nice place facing in the window have done it good. It already produces some offspring.

And I don't know if you noticed it on the picture above, but one of the shoots even has grown a tiny pitcher already. I hadn't noticed it at first, but I spotted it when I was spraying the plant (which I do often because this tropical plant likes a high humidity).

There are no signs of the development of more pitchers yet, but I do hope it will produce a couple more since these red pitchers make this plant really special.

My vegatable garden

I have a small part of my backyart which I use as a vegetable garden. Last year most of my crops were eaten by slugs. Actually only my cherry tomatoes survived. But I'm trying it again, We've had quite a dry first months of the year so far, so I hope we will get less slugs.
I've just started planting seeds indoor last week. I'm a bit late, but I do hope they will grow soon with the sunny days ahead.

Here are the crops that I've seeded:

Cherry tomatoes

Cucumbers

Water melon

Red beet

Runner beans

I've placed the containers right in a spot where they get the most sunlight during the day. And now we just have to wait for the seeds to germinate and grow!

So, this was the update of my plants for now. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, comment, tips or tricks; let me know in the comment section.