Potager plantings

I have come in for afternoon tea. Fresh bread and nutella and a strong, large cup of builder’s tea. Reviving.   I have spent the afternoon in the potager trying to plant out all the trays and trays of veg.

The morning was devoted to driving to town and picking up our new terrace awning.   I shoehorned it into the car by having it hang half out the front passenger window and half out the back. Most playful on the highway.

I’m going to try my luck and plant swiss chard in the lower potager again this year – despite the entire crop being dessimated by four legged fiends.   I have managed to sow quite a few trays, so I shall put others up on the top vegetable bed and hope they never venture there to forage.

So under one cloche went 16 swiss chard of all colours, and 16 lettuce seedlings. As these cloches are right next to the freshly mown path I couldn’t resist planting in bare feet. That’s the first of the year.   And it felt wonderful. Naturally stepping onto the bark chip path wasn’t the same sensorial experience – especially as the bark is nice and crispy now. But it made the soft respite of lawn feel all the more therapeutic.

I can’t quite walk all the way up to the potting shed (forgot to bring down the rake) in bare feet, as I haven’t strimmed the steps yet, but one day…

Next in went the extra lettuce left over from the main section: where to put them? I just alternated them in rows in the broad bean beds. I’m short of protective cloches so I have to squish things up.   Still it gave me a chance to sow the last few broad bean seeds in the gaps, and cover the entire bed in a new mulch.   This is the potting mix from Castorama that you wouldn’t use on precious seedlings in the pots as it’s too rough, but for the price you can’t beat it for mulching. (Two euros fifty for fifty litres.)

For variety (and a chance to sit down rather than crouch) I started to cut away the weeds that are threatening to engulf the soft fruit trees. You could barely see the little blueberry shrubs under their mantle of weediness.   And the jostaberries and blackcurrants now look a bit more tamed.   I need to strim around the back here too. But I can’t see that happening until I get all the plants in and spend a bit of time painting and cleaning the guest house this week.

Up at the shed in the fork hunt I noticed that the sunflowers were drooping and threatening to grow out of their pots. So a quick executive decision and I have decided to plant them beside the future cucumbers in the newly made cucumber cage.   They need support when they grow and I have run out of places to put up more poles. It may crowd out the cucumbers, but that will be a future gardening challenge. It will also mean they are exposed to passing wildlife, but I’m quite hoping that they will grow up and away before that drama occurs.

The lumpy looking soil is a mulch of one year old horse manure from Claude’s.   It looks dreadful but I’m hoping it will feed and suppress weeds over the next month or so before I have to apply another mulch over the top.

More? This is a bit of a shopping list of achievements I’m afraid. But the cabbage seedlings came next. I have heaps as we are quite the brassica family fans.   Greyhound variety planted quite close together for a summer green.   How many? Maybe sixty plants. You get dizzy trying to count.  Some of these seedlings looked a bit nibbled from last fortnight’s planting out. Slugs? Or mice? Naturally if I was bright I would go out tonight with a torch and check. But by 10pm I’m fading so fast I couldn’t imagine doing it. Mind you the moon is so bright I could probably do it without the torch.

I have one spare cloche for cabbages in this quadrant. I wish I had an extra one, but Bernard, the mighty cloche builder has moved away now and doesn’t do these small little tasks that have made a great difference to the garden. Remind me that in my next life I want to come back as a carpenter, it would be a very useful skill.   I think there are 48 cavollo neros in this cloche.   But it reminds me I should sow some more this month and plant them out in the top vegetable plot as insurance.

There’s more I’m sure: oh yes, weeding and thinning. I did all the carrots, all the beetroot, an extra pass of the radish and then went doolally from so much close weeding work and went inside to lie down.