www.tanstaafl.co.uk

As I’ve just posted about sowing broad beans I can remind myself of how they were doing a little over six weeks from today, two years ago. I’d just planted them out.

I can’t for the life of my remember why I put these mesh cloches over them though. It may have been so that I could cover them with fleece in the event of a likely heavy frost without damaging the plants.

There appear to be around 20 plants here. This year I’ve planted far more on the grounds that there never seem to be enough that are ready to pick at the same time and leaving them until there are enough means we end up with much larger and tougher beans.

I’ve ended up somewhat behind with stuff this Winter. Before Christmas my daughter and I both developed an ear infection that totally messed up my sense of balance for about a week and a couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of a particularly nasty bout of cellulitis. I don’t really recall anything about the first forty-eight hours of having cellulitis other than vague hints of wittering randomly about stuff that really can’t have made sense and quite possibly didn’t actually happen 😀

Anyhow, the cellulitis meant I wasn’t really on the ball when we had some tree work done, including felling a sycamore that was leaning over some of the outbuildings. As a result I only finished clearing that part of the brash that was blocking access to the veggie plot yesterday, by feeding it through the chipper. I now have four and a half dumpy bags full of woodchip that will come in handy when I remake the paths in the veggie plot shortly (and there’s more to come).

Today therefore I got into the greehouse and sowed lots of broad beans (Aquadulce Claudia) and a first batch of antirrhinums (Lipstick Silver and Black Prince). The latter are to go into a bed of flowers for cutting later in the year (not least because the only place the bed exists at the moment is inside my head). Had I been able I’d have started the beans off perhaps a week or so ago, but thems the breaks.

I also had a bit of a clear-out and reorganise in the propagation greenhouse. I had a dozen and a half tomato cuttings that I’d successfully grown on from my father-in-law’s F1 Orange Paruche plants last September, but a particularly cold (for us, at -6°C) night saw them all killed off. My fault. I should have been more on-the-ball, though it may have happened when I was suffering myself. Those went into the compost along with some plants I’d kept after doing some test germinations before finalising my list of seeds to buy last November. They’d become all rather leggy due to the lack of light (it’s been a very dull Winter, weather-wise). So now other than my newly-sown seeds, all I have is new strawberry plants that I had to pot up because the new strawberry bed doesn’t exist yet either, and peppers/chiles that I grew last year and thought I’d leave to see if they’d make it through the Winter in the greenhouse. I’m not too hopeful in that respect, but we’ll see what happens.