Sunday morning is generally our big time for doing work at The Shack - there is a period of 2 hours between 10am and midday when we can use petrol motors, so John can play with chainsaw, rotavator, strimmer, brush-cutter and other noisy things, while I supervise cats and do "stuff". Yesterday and overnight we had the first proper rain for ages, so the machines didn't come out to play but we did have a good check round and cuddled cats.
I sorted out my box of seeds about a month ago, throwing out most opened packets and anything over 7 years old (!). Those between 5 and 7 years old and interesting (10 packets of seeds for kale and while it may be a super food, I'm still not going to grow it) I took to The Shack along with a stack of 6 - 8 inch pots. A couple of weeks ago, I filled 7 pots with my miracle horse poo and leaf mould mix from the bin, and sowed the whole packet of each of cat mint, dill, coriander, basil, lettuce Webbs Wonder, chard Bright Lights and Autumn King carrots. It felt rather good to be quite so profligate! Anyway, despite pretty awful germinating conditions - first unseasonably hot, then unseasonably cold - today's inspection showed that so far at least the chard and the carrots are coming up! Yes, I have spotted there is an interloper among the carrots - it has been removed.
Inspection of the bed planted with garlic, shallots and Hispi cabbage showed really good growth on the shallots, well apart from a Donald shaped gap! I'm sure the delayed ones will catch up in due course and no one was rolling around on the wet soil today!
Things aren't so good on the fruit front. While I have a small Victoria plum tree in the garden at home that is wrapped round with fleece at the moment to protect the fruitlets, the big tree at the end of the wildflower meadow does not have that luxury. You can see the fruitlets are nearly black and when I picked one off and dissected it with my thumb nail, it was clearly unviable and frosted.
The cherry blossom has also been affected - I'm hoping that it is just that the petals have been fried by the frost and that the fruit will somehow survive, but with more nights of frost over the next week, I fear my ability to stand and scoff a kilo of cherries while allegedly doing something useful in the meadow will be severely curtailed this year.
Tomorrow I am likely to have a rant about orchids. Just to warn you.
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