Does anyone know anything about gardening?

Reported to whom? The bamboo protection authorities?

Plants will grow, irrespective of your gardening abilities.

The hard part is growing the plants you want to grow, whilst controlling those you don't want.

Repotted! Stealth edit in the house!

@andyp have a habit of letting container/window box dry out, to the point where when you water them, the water just runs straight through. Hence why I was looking for pebbles a page or so back, to cover the top soil and keep it damp/moist.
Am also about to implement lazy watering life hack, and have cut the ends off some water bottles which will be shoved into the soil and will hopefully water plants over a longer period of time.

bags of blue slate chips can be had very cheaply at most garden emporia.

Free compost in brockwell park too at the mo (outside the walled garden). Sort of missing a garden now we're 25m up in the air. House plants & herbs however are loving it - herbs have doubled in size this week.

Strangely apart from the big palm - things I can never keep alive.

A bit of heavy duty work today, I'm scaling back the large bed I made out of railway sleepers and topsoil nearly ten years ago as I don't grow so much these days and I want more space for beer and BBQ. From 6' square to 1x6' but raised... so far I have removed the hideous weeds and dug out the sleepers, Christ I forgot how heavy they were. Not looking forward to sawing one on them into 6 bits by hand... :-/

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Also discovered some cool garden guests 😎

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Oh god, so cute. My landlady tells me that there's a "long-standing community of toads" in my garden but I haven't seen any yet - I'm going to sink a basin of some kind down for them in the hope the regular water will encourage them to show themselves.

Landlady also says she saw a slow worm in the garden once and it'd make my year if I spotted one of those in real life. Only seen earthworms so far, they're not quite as exciting. And slugs. So many slugs. Need moar adorable slug-eating predators.

I'd of thought that if you had toads your slug population would be low. We have a pond with a lot of frogs and zero slugs problems.

Never seen a slow worm (sadly) but we did find newts in our pond last year. They had babies as well. Hoping thet'll be here this year again #csb

I'd have thought that too, but she didn't say when she last saw one, and I moved in right as they'd have been going into hibernation. From what she's said the last tenants here kind of trashed the garden and maybe that scared them off, or maybe they just hate me. Could be all kinds of reasons I haven't seen any. Hopefully I can make the place a bit friendlier to them and they can come back and get on with feasting on the bodies of my enemies.

Yeah our frog community has been here at least 10 years. Done for the day, was planning three layers of wood but decided to stop at two. Now just need a couple of half barrel planters for the excess topsoil then decide - deck or pave my new space??

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you back in teh londonz then olly, enough of lincs?

(tell me to mind me own bleedin business if you like..)

Decking would be cheaper, Indian sandstone would work very nicely in that space and would be no more expensive than decent quality slabs. If you'd like some info on how to do either, send me a pm with your number and I'll do what I can to help you avoid the pitfalls. I do this stuff for a living (as I have bored the forum with before) and you could possibly use my company name and discount.

^nice guy

Aye, Lincs didn't work out, so I am back in London.

Thanks Colin!!! PM incoming :-)
My main concern with decking is that I'd have to dig down to make space for a frame (or raise the decking a bit). Oh, and it's round, which would be a faff.

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Your pet toads will be nocturnal, spending the day tucked up under stones or rubble, as will any slow worms (also in your compost heap). Toads only really bother with water in the breeding season, so you're a little late with the sink, they might appreciate it next year!

Get some small pots and some compost and follow the instructions on the packet to plant them. Leave them inside for now until they've germinated and are growing nicely, then gradually harden them off by leaving them outside during the day, but bringing them at night for a week or so.

Then once we're into the middle of May you should be able to plant them outside and see how they get on. The tomatoes should be fine, not sure on the red peppers or cucumbers. We're trying the latter for the first time this year, but have had no luck with red peppers in the past.

I've only managed to grow red peppers by buying a pop up plastic mini green house and putting that on top of them.

Others may know this already, but it seems some councils offer discounted compost bins, wormeries, and bokashi bins. In my case, £5 from Tower Hamlets (http://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgsl/501-550/533_recycling_and_waste_at_hom/home_composting.aspx).

Yeah I got a worm bin about 6 years ago this way (they even mailed me the worms...). It's still going strong and producing some great compost (albeit full of seeds). Really useful if you don't have space for a compost heap and want to recycle your food watse (I didn't have space until I got an allotment and it lived happily on our balcony).

Yeah - we're in a flat with a fairly small balcony. But a tiny wormery will do the job for some, if not most, of our organic waste - so win! Just waiting for TH to organize it. Pretty pumped about it, actually. Should have got on it sooner though. I'm going to need some compost in the next week or two. A lot of my planters are coming on their third year and need to be zested up.