4th June

4^th June

Again I went to the allotment at lunchtime and after work. At lunch, I erected a wigwam for each trio of sweet peas and strung some twine around and tied them in, and I put in some poles along the line of sweet peas by the compost bin and did the same with string there too. It was a worthwhile stop-off as this job took half an hour and would have seriously detracted from other work at the end of the day. After work I laid some weed suppressing membrane at one end of section 9 and planted out my 10 sweet corn plants and watered them in. I raked the manure around the areas that needed it and watered the carrots and cornflowers. It is a joy and a relief to see the carrots coming up after last year when I had 3 which were all eaten before reaching a point anywhere near maturity. It just goes to show that you have to have the right soil for carrots, and also how good a rabbit defence mechanism is, not just for carrots, but the onions which are all doing fantastically. The leaves are big and bold and fat and juicy, I just hope the bulbs are in a similar condition come harvest. Then there are the leeks that will be planted out too. All these would be devastated by rabbits were it not for a £20 wire mesh fence – what a false economy it was last year not to have one.

 

The Kitchen Garden at Kew Gardens

In the evening I had to clear a load of junk away from in front of the back gate. There was an old BBQ cover that is all mucky, a slimy and dirty plastic washing up bowl and a nearly rusted away tin bin. I also had to cut back the lilac tree where it impinged access to the gate, and scrape away a mound of soil that has accumulated over years from various organic material, mainly that which has blown down from the trees and rotted down into an incredibly fine, sandy soil once one sieves out the stones and clears it of roots, which I did, and stored to be used for further carrot sowings at the allotment as it is tremendously fine and I hope very well stocked with nutrients. All this was for the fact that workmen need to get into our back garden tomorrow.

More run of the mill gardening tasks were potting up rocket into large containers and planting out 4 salvias into open ground – heavily protected by slug pellets and porridge (the slugs have to eat their way through that to get to the plants and hopefully are too stuffed to eat any plant when they get there!) – and 4 into pots made from the bottom section of 4 pint milk containers. These containers have been cut so that they can sit in the window box of the play house. Four of them will fit in but as the box is in the shade, I am making 8 and then rotating them so they spend time in daylight.