At last! Something to see!

Drizzle this morning giving way to smashing spring sunshine, & a rainbow – which I wasn’t quick enough with the camera to photograph.

Our fellow allotmenteers are starting to come out of their hibernation, I think, although I haven’t seen Reg-next-plot for a couple of weeks. Barry could be heard a couple of plots away helping last week’s hardworking young man with advice, and nosing at all the other plots, all the old hands are turning in their well rotted compost.

This is (yet another!) area which really does need addressing – feeding the soil/crops on the plot is clearly a Good Thing – but do you just bung on a handful of Growmore type stuff every now and again – or water in a feed? Do you incorporate your own well rotted compost in the autumn to next years spud patch, or give that area a good old blanket of horse muck from the skip (like we’ve done)? Or all of the above?

Whatever the answer to that lot is, I can see the benefits of having a compost heap (or preferably two – so I think that I’m going to have to liberate some pallets, tie them together and fill the resulting ‘bin’ with a load from the horse muck skip to get us going.

Today’s Big Seed News is that some of the radish seeds are actually sprouting in the seed bed! Not many, but DEFINITELY there! Nothing else showing, but I put in a row of PEAS (kelvedon wonder), BEETROOT (woden F1) & PARSNIP (white gem) marking this row with a sowing of RADISH (marabelle). Actually it’s a particulary stingy marking of the parsnip row with radish as there were only about 10 seeds left in the packet.

Half way through sowing the fiddly little parsnip seed, I remembered that I had thought about germinating the seed on damp kitchen paper to give the seed a head start, so it’ll serve me right if they don’t come up at.

I was also going to sow some spinach, but couldn’t remember where it went in the rotation, so I’ve had to go back to the drawing board with that.

Finally, I planted a couple of north/south rows of POTATO (rocket) – 15 in each row – then off to Hiron’s to buy 20 cara main crop potatoes which will be enough for two rows, then I’ll buy another main crop (possibly international kidney, or rooster which seems to be raved about on the Grapevine...)

Lots to learn, lots to do!