Happy Spring! And we have had a full week of sunny and warm weather which has brought out a lot of fruit blossom, pretty well done for the narcissi, and sent the cowslips into overdrive. We'd thought it wasn't going to be a good year for them, but they have gone over the top. There are more than ever of the red and orange ones and some odd variations which make us think that they may well hybridise with polyanthus. This would explain the red and orange variants and also the rather odd one with primrose flowers on cowslip style stems!
The honesty is also putting on a great display this year. It is a biannual so these are the ones that germinated last year and it must have been a good year for that. Wandering through the Orchard and Wildflower Meadow, I can seen hundreds, if not thousands, of orchid rosettes preparing for May. They are spreading further and further as we get rid of the scrub, and the choking nettles and old man's beard, and will now curtail our ability to mow anything more than a path around the Meadow and Orchard for the next few months. However I did spot one with a hairy caterpillar on it. If there is a specific orchid butterfly or moth, then it has found the right place, if not, it will be bird food!!
It was a major fail with the trail camera this week, which was a bit of a surprise after last week's excitement. I only moved it about 20 feet, so should have seen the same level of action, but all I caught were two pigeons. When I looked into the field behind where the camera was, I had an interesting, if one-sided, conversation with 5 young heifers, which might explain the lack of deer and boar. The camera has moved on now.
Which brings us on to the potatoes. We started to develop the allotment patches in the Garden in 2019, and now we are back to the first patch for potatoes, after growing them in two other plots in 2020 and 2021. The soil was industrial clay with builder's rubble when we started (perhaps harsh, but that's what it felt like), but we have added a lot of organic material since. I am told that rotavating was hard work, but not as bad as it has been, and certainly cleaning up what had been turned wasn't as bad as it has been. I also added 5 sacks of real leaf mould before covering up the ground with weed suppressant matting and planting the seed potatoes through it. We've gone with second earlies again this year - it worked in our favour last year, as the tops were dying off as blight started to hit, so we weren't affected. The resulting tubers aren't as huge as main crop can be, but the variety we choose is versatile and also stores well. We are still eating last year's crop! So half done, the other half to do over the next couple of weeks, depending on the weather.
Finally, in the saga of Bridie the Freeloading Bantam, she might perhaps be relenting a bit about sharing eggs with us. She has found a way of getting into the chicken run (but can't get out again, which is weird), and laid an egg in the coop, which I scooped up with the eggs from the other chickens. Then no more eggs, until I approached the chicken run from a different angle and found she had decided to lay in their "field shelter". So we took those, and very tasty they were too. Another egg appeared in the coop, which I left, and the following day, there was another one! They are quite small but very white!
Have a good week!
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