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Over the last weekend in April I was mostly mowing grass in the orchard and “upstairs field” and playing chainsaws. In fact I’m not really sure where the time went, but I did manage to do a bit of planting too — more peas, beetroot, carrots and salad veg. My daughter and I also set up canes for the french beans to climb up once they get planted outside.

A quick check over the plot showed up one potato plant that has broken the surface, lots of beetroot and carrots from my first planting, spring onions are starting to emerge as well, with that “bent over” stalk thing they do. In the greenhouse we had six butternut squashes that had germinated and I potted on the courgettes and melons from the propagator. I also potted on my initial sowing of chiles. I ended up with thirty-two plants in all which is far more than I need, but makes me happy as a programmer because it’s a power of two 🙂

My daughter doesn’t seem to get why I’m so fascinated by seeing things start to grow in the veg plot when “it happens around us all the time”. But that’s precisely one of the reasons that it is so amazing. Life gets created from insignificant little bits of stuff, not just now and then, but all over the place, all the time. That’s not astonishing? I showed her some rocket seeds by way of an example. They’re so incredibly tiny, but add warmth, air, water and a few chemicals present in the soil and that speck of dust somehow turns into a plant? I think it’s one of those things that the more you understand it, the more amazing it is.

A week or so on from my last photos and the onions are really starting to grow now (as are some of the weeds)

and a few of the peas are starting to see daylight as well. These are “Sugar Ann” sugar snap peas:

In the greenhouse, the french beans (“Cobra”) are really going for it.

(That’s a bucket containing chile plants in the top left corner).

Vegetable seeds started arriving in the first week of April and I considered myself lucky to get so much of what I wanted given that just about everyone else in the country seemed to be trying to do the same thing.

Radish were the first think to be planted (French Breakfast 3). We rarely have radish in salads unless we grow them ourselves, yet it’s one of my favourite things to buy when we go to the supermarket in France when we’re on holiday. A week later they’re already poking their seed leaves out of the ground.

Onion sets were also starting to show some signs of life only having been in the ground for a week.

Birds did pull a few up early on, but not that many and I replaced them all shortly afterwards.

With the impending arrival of lockdown in the UK we decided that it might be useful to grow some more of our own food and it therefore became necessary to increase the space we use for growing vegetables which has shrunk a fair bit since we had children. In mid March I marked out a new area of about fourteen metres by twelve alongside our existing plot.

Digging was tough going even with a one metre wide rotorvator on the back of the tractor and it took quite some time to get the ground into a usable state, but a couple of weeks later I was done and it looked rather more like somewhere it would be possible to plant vegetables.

Stakes needed to go back in to mark the paths and suchlike (there’s woodchip to go on the paths, but little time to get it done for the time being), but most importantly I needed seeds to start arriving.