Raspberry renovations for a proper Spring day

Hurray at last for a proper Spring day when I can actually get out for hours in the garden!

Adventures at Windy Acre is today brought to you by the colour blue...

Muscari brought in pots from the old house, found to be flowering away in a dark and poky corner, so I brought them up onto the little patio area

...and by the number 3:

3 ridiculously oversized redcurrant bushes requiring maintenance pruning so I can at least walk on the path past them to the greenhouse;

3 apparently reasonable rows of raspberry plants - thought the jury is still out on which ones are summer fruiting and which are autumn fruiting, as even grandma can't remember which ones she planted where...ahem....;

and 3 hours of solid on the knees weeding with hand fork around the base of the above so that they can be liberally scattered around with wood ash from the fires and them tucked in happily for the season with a nice blanket of rotted manure for a mulch.

I remembered to take a 'before' picture, but only just - see kneeling pad, fork and buckets all out and ready to go...

Here's the view of the double row of raspberries looking from south to north.  Admittedly they look a bit ropey at the moment but hopefully they will romp along once weeded, fed and then tied in to new taut wires...

...and here's the single row, running east-west, so that the raspberries as a whole create a sort of 'L' shape around the 3 monster redcurrants and 1 extremely less monster-like blackcurrant (I do worry about the blackcurrant, he looks a bit wee and feeble alongside the rumbustious brazen buxomness of the redcurrant ladies - yes, they're definitely ladies, the sort who stick their chests out and back comb their hair...I think they are the redcurrant equivalent of the 'Fat Ladies' in the paintings by Beryl Cook!)

Here they are ready for their close-up.  You truly cannot appreciate their rude health until they accost you as you try to walk down the path.  Let's hope they deliver on their promise by bearing loads of fruit, otherwise as my nannan would have said: "All fur coat and no knickers"....

School run interrupted play, so weeding job not 100% finished today.  Looking forward to photographing it looking all nice and clean in the next few days.

In the meantime, homework is to study carefully this area where the driveway comes out onto the road, and think about ideas for planting that will work and make a cheerful welcoming entrance...

Grandma found that what she tried struggled here - even the daffodils seem to be half blind, and the Vinca is the only thing happily growing away (but then that would grow happily in a nuclear bomb crater). It's probably quite dry here? Also shady for the most part as it's facing north and east and underneath an enormous tree (Beech?) which will shortly leaf up and cast dense shade over it except in the early morning, when in the summer it could get quite warm next to those walls for a few hours at least...Hmmmmm, plenty to ponder over here!