My daughter mowed the grass again today. The second time this season and it’s still March! It is growing astonishingly fast. She had a decent trailer full of clippings despite cutting it only last weekend and only doing half the area that we usually cut.
It’s all gone into the compost now, layered with a load of paper we’re trying to get rid of. I checked the temperature of the heap earlier in the week and it was almost 50°C. The volume of material on the heap has decreased enormously, too.
My timing was all messed up today because of the clocks changing, confused even more by my bedside clock resetting itself early in the morning thanks to a power cut.
Nonetheless, I managed to get lots of sweet peas, sugar snaps and beetroot planted out. I still have quite a few sweet peas left over. I’ll have to work out a way to use those somehow.
Such a pleasure to have a day without rain!
I was on a mission today, starting with planting out all my onion seedlings. I reckon there are in the region of 700 plants, a mix of red and brown onions. That took a fair while 🙂
Once they were done I build the supports for the peas (for pods) and planted those down the middle of a bed, with some clumps of radishes in the space alongside. Some of the peas were really far larger than they ideally should have been, but given the weather we’ve had, what can you do? I’m a bit concerned that pheasant or other pests might try to eat the seedlings, so I’ve made a wall of mesh cloches around them which I’ll leave in place until they’re established.
The rest of the day was construction, making up the supports for sugar snap peas and sweet peas. They’re ready to go out as well, so that’s tomorrow’s job. Hopefully I can get through a few others that need doing, too.
I’ve often wondered what triggers this to happen…
Given that we’ve lived here almost twenty years, it’s common to see mushrooms pop up in roughly the same places each year. And there are some that appear where I’ve been spreading compost recently, which is perhaps no surprise given that it may contain a certain amount of woodchip.
And then there are these, suddenly appearing where I’ve never seen any before.
How did they get there?
Given the problems I’ve been having with my cheapy polytunnel, it struck me today that I could turn it into a kind of polycrub given, say, some recycled scaffold boards for the sides and six sheets of twinwall polycarbonate.
I don’t think I’d need to use particularly thick polycarbonate, but even so I am slightly unsure about how well it might bend over the relatively tight radius of the tunnel. But then it occurred to me that I might be able use the sheets horizontally and overlap the edges (like tiles). Where it comes down to the timber on the sides I might even be able to install gutters for collecting rainwater.
Even three metre sheets of 6mm twinwall polycarbonate aren’t exactly cheap, but I suspect it might be possible to get them and all the necessary fixings for around £300. I know there’s somewhere local that sells off used scaffold boards, too.
Can’t let it get too far up the priority list though. Need to get some other projects finished first.
You’re not going to believe this: we had a load more rain today. More than once I was forced to take shelter in a greenhouse or polytunnel to avoid the horizontal raindrops. I was watering in the polytunnel at one point at the rain was so hard that I didn’t dare leave!
There was a bit of lull this afternoon however, and I took the opportunity to finally plant out my Charlotte potatoes. Only two weeks after I planned to have it done. It was a bit unpleasant because the ground is so wet, but there are plenty of volunteer potatoes coming up so I didn’t think it was going to cause the new ones any major stress. So but for about three metres that’s one bed filled up already 😀
Hopefully I can get a lot more planting out sorted tomorrow, when the weather man has promised me on pain of death that it is going to be sunny all day.
We’ve reached that point. I decided that what tomatoes there are aren’t going to ripen any further on the vines, so I picked absolutely everything.
and then removed all the plants from the polytunnel.
I’d missed spreading compost on the beds earlier in the year for some reason, so I spread a bit about now the plants were out of the way (other than the peppers)
Oh, the luffa fruit were also picked and the plants removed
And then the Winter salads transplanted in around the pepper plants.
I came across these for the first time today. A polycrub is, apparently, part way between a polytunnel and a greenhouse. It is (can be) a similar size to a polytunnel and has the usual hooped frame that a polytunnel does, but has a twin-wall polycarbonate sheet skin as might be found on a greenhouse where glass was impractical. The lower parts of the side walls might be made from timber.
Given that our weather is becoming more stormy and violent they might be a solution to covered growing that is preferable to both a greenhouse and a polytunnel. It’s not like I need any more project ideas, but it might be an interesting thing to try to build on a small scale to see how it works out here in the south-west UK.
Because I think I might need to 😀
Today has been possibly one of the most grim days weatherwise that I can recall here. My wife apparently woke up to blue skies and (unforecast) frost. By the time I’d dragged myself into consciousness it was raining. And raining. And raining a bit more. Oh, and some fairly serious winds, too. Mid-morning the gutters had given up any pretence of trying to cope with the volume of water and it was just pouring over the tops. I went outside to check nothing was too much amiss and discovered a small stream running down the drive and into the workshop. A gully that was dry but muddy yesterday was perhaps 45cm (a foot and a half) full of rainwater. Despite the fact that we live on the side of a hill and there’s really no level ground at all, water was just sitting on top of the soil 🙁
Like I said, grim.
Most of my day seems to have been spent putting the cover back on the cheapo polytunnel (four times, I think) and trying to work out how to make it stay put. More on that another time.
Now of course we have clear sky (at least partly), but it’s all good because more rain is forecast tomorrow. What a relief we’re not heading for a drought.
I’m really not sure, to be honest. It’s not the last of the fruit on the plants and the weather is still very mild, so it may well be that they aren’t. We’ll just have to wait and see if there’s enough warmth left for them to ripen.
