Seed Diary cont'd

I was quite exhausted today -- the week was catching up with me -- and could easily have slept all day. But I had things to do, despite the rotten weather.

During a break in the rain, I managed to sow

* more flowers (portulaca, dianthus, sweet peas, blue ageratum, midday flower, lupins, nasturtiums)
* rainbow chard "Bright Lights"
* perpetual spinach
* lemon basil
* thyme
* more runner beans
* leeks

and probably loads more stuff, which I've forgotten. I was running out of recycled plant pots and OH kindly helped me out with seed trays.

I did manage to entice OH to come to the allotment with me. He quickly put our dinner on -- a whole roast chicken with garden herbs (oregano, lovage, rosemary, parsley) and then we rattled off through icy gusts of wind to the plot. I'd packed the cart with a sack of vine weevil-infested compost, which I was going to drown in an old water-filled wheelbarrow so that I could recycle the compost again, and I'd also strapped on about 10 eight-foot-long hazel rods from our first coppicing adventure. Was a job getting that load round various corners and cars and across busy roads!

Everything as it should be on the plot: water butts predictably full to the brim. Harvested rhubarb (one load for us, one for the neighbours) and herbs for the couscous later -- coriander and applemint.

Amongst our planned plants, the onions are well up, the potatoes (earlies) are poking through, and the spinach Matador is also sprouting. No sign of the broad beans yet (you can just picture them sat just under the near-freezing surface grimacing and waving their little broad-bean-shaped middle fingers...). Nothing else is obviously coming out -- it really is far too cold and inhospitable for it. I read back through the blog -- we had a late frost in mid-May last year so there's no point in getting over-excited and taking stupid risks. The strawberries are working so hard, throwing out flowers after flowers, only to lose 40% of them to the frost. Been wandering around again earlier, snipping off the ones with the dark centre. Meh.

Having said that, I am running an experiment: we've got so many strawberry plants at the moment that we don't know what to do with them so today, I also planted some of them in the big long castiron window basket at the front of our house, along with the one surviving and flowering geranium from last year. Would it not be nice to walk past a house in May/June and see real strawberries tumbling out of flower baskets? I think so.

Mmmh. Walked into the kitchen from the allotment just now and encountered the gorgeous aroma of roast chicken. Will log off now and make my side of tonight's tea: tiramisu.

Then I'm looking forward to settling down with my knitting and a glass of something home-brewed in front of the new Danish/Swedish crime series The Bridge. So suave. So cool. Those Scandinavians are so EVOLVED. Although the snark in me wonders whether Scandinavian crime writers and directors are actually capable of coming up with a female detective who isn't an obvious Asperger's case.