Sowing season

There you are. I know. I find I have to physically remove myself from the farm to actually make time to write. There is just an insane amount to do in the daylight hours.

And as we are now in ‘summer time’ I find that I’m up early… as usual… but have to be dragged in by 7pm from the garden.

It’s all a delight of course. If you don’t count the bramble lacerations on the wrists where there is that perennial gap between glove and sleeve.

But the best part of the past month has been seed sowing. The magic.

It never palls.

I spent many a happy hour in the winter with the seed packets and assembling the baskets of seeds destined for February, March and April.

The first up were parsley, tomatoes and kale. And then it has been a flurry. A blur of sowing ever since.

And then comes that hilarious moment when you realise some things are just not germinating.

I’m looking at you cucumber and courgette.

And you sow again. Three weeks apart.

Luckily I have a good supply of all the seeds.

And a not very helpful helper.

I think she is having a flashback to the first six months when I ‘tamed’ her and she refused to leave the potting shed the whole first lockdown. Just in case I returned to add more croquettes into her bowl. She was too wild to realise that she could come closer to the house and still get fed. That was a year away in her little adventure.

But it does mean that she gets a bit needy feedy when I’m in the potting shed while she is there too.

If I’m really lucky she stays on my chaise longue and just watches. But any approach to the potting bench where I am reaching for a plant label or another pair of secateurs and she staggers up and begs.

And of course she has no idea why I shriek when she treads on my seedlings. She is just coming closer to get my attention.

Treading on my precious tomato seedlings gets my attention, I can tell you. The Pest. Why doesn’t she stomp on the helichrysums? I have a jungle of those.