23/24 May - Prose Special!

This post there will be no pictures - just didn't take any as there is so much else to distract in the plot. I'll try to make the prose come alive.

On Friday 23rd, K nipped up on her own for a quick check on the courgettes, beans and corn, planted the previous weekend. Alas the corn was looking droopy and dry, the courgettes apathetic and the beans looking frankly weedy. Homemade compost mulch was quickly applied around the base of each plant and the first Magic Rotating Compost Juice was applied. And of course water. K was disturbed to find the Pagoda peas had all been munched - by mice it would seem. And indeed there is now a groundswell of negativity about mice. They have been at our neighbours' carrots and peas. And no doubt at our sown corn and beans in Bed D. There is poison put down near our shed and Jan and Pat have even got mousetraps. If it isn't one varmint, it's another.

Also Jack Frost has nipped people's potatoes and I hear has wiped out some people's beans. But, strangely, not ours. We must be outside the "frost pocket". That somehow makes up for the frustrated start with the beans and corn.

The Saturday was productive. Surprisingly so as we had been planning to go away but a combination of weather forecast and work commitments had sadly scuppered that. We planted butternut squash and mini-pop corn (both of which happily flourishing from home) in Bed D, weeded and strimmed.

Two giant pumpkin plants were placed in their new homes - one next to the shed (where the mice seem to have their HQ so we're hoping they don't eat pumpkin) and one in the pallet compost thing. As all our pumpkins came up, we found ourselves in the happy position of having largesse to distribute to our neighbours. Two took a seedling.

It is an interesting business, this, the getting of seedlings. You can go to a lot of trouble, do research on-line or in mags, buy seeds off the internet, sow them, they don't come up, you go to the garden centre in desperation, buy some more any old mongrel variety, then your neighbours give you some for free, of an unspecified variety also, so then you have a glut of plants of whose origin you are uncertain. I think the maths does work out in the end but impossible to judge the consequences of not keeping to the original plan. And also how many runner bean plants equals a pumpkin seedling?

Thus we acquired some more runner beans and french beans. The former have been imaginatively placed in the Pagoda to climb up twiggy sticks until they get to proper beams to climb on; and the french beans, plus the extra ones we had bought, got stuck into the wigwam which had extra poles in and netting over the top. We should have enough beans - remember we have some at home too.

Potatoes are looking very good and were duly earthed up. The garlic is beginning to go yellow round the edges and the elephant garlic flowers are poking up. Methinks it might not be too long before the garlic "goes over" (technical term). We should have around 50 bulbs of garlic, if all works out. And space for the leeks, hurrah.

Carrots, onions, leeks and broccoli/cabbage/kale seedlings were thinned. It is most gratifying to see how strong all the seedlings are. It was not easy to choose the candidates for the chop as they all looked healthy, but they need space to grow. The leek and onion plants sown from seed directly into the ground are now also beginning to look defined, thicker-stemmed. (Did we mention the leek glut? We now have leek seedlings from home, leeks in the soil, Mr G's leeks and Sainsbury's leeks.) I worry that I didn't thin the carrots sufficiently discreetly to foil the Dreaded Carrot Fly. We must sow some more carrots and radish. All other salad type crops we will grow at home in a new vegetable patch.

In the Pagoda, we are still concerned about the ants. Jan tells me that it is the aphids that they like which are on the tree. We will have to do something about it as it stresses the tree (quite naturally). The strawberries are flowering and some even have fruit. Otherwise the blueberry bushes have flowered and the raspberries are roaring away. We even have flowers on one autumn plant already.

Weather note: sunny, cloudy, warmish, fat drops of rain occasionally

And then the heavens open on Sunday, so no trips to the plot. And the rain is still falling on Monday. Very good for the dry old plot. Even though we water, it is not the same as good rain.