I know it’s not many, but this makes me so happy.
We eat so many pickled jalapenos. These might only last three or four months. But having them out of our own garden rather than bought from a supermarket feels so good. I look forward to popping the first jar open.
I wanted some twine in a hurry to finish setting up some of the pea supports so ordered it from that South American river place because they have stuff that’s biodegradable and can go into the compost along with the plants at the end of the Summer.
Excitedly (ok, maybe not quite excited) I opened the package when it arrived this lunchtime, to find these:
I think they’re mop/broom hangers. I don’t really see that they’re going to work for peas. I’ve given it another try with delivery tomorrow. Perhaps they’ll get it right this time. Or I’ll have eight hangers. Who knows?
I peeled a couple of the luffa fruit today. They’re not really fully ripe so it was a little tough to get the skins off, but I eventually managed it. The seeds were still white rather than the normal black as further evidence of the lack of ripeness, but they certainly weren’t going to get any better.
I’m quite happy with the result however. I’m not sure I’ll grow them again unless the weather changes for the warmer and sunnier or we move to a property in a warmer and sunnier area, but it’s been a very interesting experiment and I’ve enjoyed doing it.
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.
