Who’d have thought…the sunshine we had on order finally turned up! Just a short while ago the plants were learning to snorkel… now they are on a full-on package holiday in the Med.
We’re not harvesting much apart from lettuce at the moment (the purple sprouting broccoli (PSB) has finished so that got whipped out last weekend), but I’m confident that in no time at all we’ll be spoilt for choice.
You may recall a while back that I’d slightly over done the onion order. I’d omitted to add that shortly after, 100 more arrived in the post. I was going to keep them quiet, and put them in the seed drawer in the hope they’d keep through summer, for autumn planting. No such luck – a quick check at the weekend revealed some were starting to sprout.
It was evident that they had to go in, so that was the task at the weekend. Perusing the onion bed, it was already pretty packed. However, clearing some weeds produced a few crafty spots in amongst the existing plants.
Casting aside the lovely neat rows, 100 red onions were duly popped in, willy nilly around the bed. Hardly any are planted up together, but I reasoned that if you turn up late for a party, you can’t be too precious who you sit with.
Next job was to plant out the carrots. Of the various rows of seeds I’ve sown, a grand sum of about ten carrots have survived. A couple of weeks ago I made paper pots and sowed some seeds in them, thinking I’d be able to move them to their final positions without disturbing the roots too much – I could plant the whole caboodle: paper pot, complete with soil and plants.
However, I hadn’t banked on the paper pots actually welding themselves to the side of the plastic crate they were in, so it was a bit hit and miss which ones came complete with pot, and which ones didn’t. No matter now though, they are all in, so I’ll just have to wait and see what happens. A few more rows of carrots went in around them, just to try their chances. They’ve all gone in the space created when the PSB came out. The crop rotation’s gone a bit to pot, as they’re supposed to go in the ‘roots and onions’ bed…err… I think not…
This one appeared in the Hinckley Times on 31 May 2012
