A Beginning and an End

Potato chitting time has arrived again! My Apache potatoes arrived in the post yesterday, so I got them straight into egg boxes and into the cool spare room. These are a maincrop potato variety with attractive red markings. We've been buying them from our local supermarket for mini roasties, so thought I might as well try growing my own. I grew Ulster Classic last year and while they were lovely in taste, they were a bit too floury for my preference - fine if you want mash all the time, but pretty useless for anything else.

This weekend I also need to redo my planting plans for the year. Maybe it was the cold weather and snow cover, but our garden in December and January was suddenly inundated by some very hungry pigeons. There have always been pigeons in the large trees surrounding the suburban veg plot and there have always been winter brassicas in the plot, but this was my first experience of the 2 meeting... And suffice to say, the brassicas came off worse.
The tuscan kale, the early sprouting broccoli, the cauliflowers bought as plug plants, the savoy cabbages - all of it, gone. This is probably gardener's karma for forgetting about them as seedlings in the autumn (see post here). I managed to net the brussels sprouts before Christmas, so saved some of those but the rest was wholly decimated. Were it not for the fact I am vegetarian, there may have been some pigeon pie served up for dinner!