Mid April

On inspection yesterday evening I noticed that the Home guard Potatoes and a few other earlies have made it to the surface. I could just about make out the dark browny green leaves pushing though the soil in the raised bed planted spuds. This came as a bit of a relief as we ignored the advice of buying the hens egg sized tubers and purchased the larger ones from the East Anglia potato day. We then cut them in to chunks with three or more chitted bits on them before planting. Twice the seed - half the price, but only if they don't rot off of course.

One of the strawberry plants has flowered - these are now in their third year and look a picture of health so I don’t think I will change them unless they begin to reduce their yields. They have been getting regular bucketfuls of the noxious smelling tea made from all the weeds I have been digging up.

The weed tea stinks to high heaven. Max won’t go near it and a few plot holders have turned their noses up at sixty paces. But I don’t think the plants can smell it, and it must be doing them no end of good. It’s in a big green water butt and gets refilled with water whenever I take from it.

I dug out a couple of trenches twelve feet long and half filled them with manure and compost. Then back filled them and set up a bean frame with the help of railway Steve (he’s six foot four - a bean frame himself). There’s a lot of Steve’s, Bobs and Allen’s up the plot so each gets their own tag.

I'll be setting up another four frames for growing several different varieties for their pods, Shelly beans and dried for winter recipes and reckon I'll need to bring around 200 seeds for the supports and another 100 flageolet bush beans to plant between the sweet corn. I had been looking for Tarbais for ages without any luck. There was one French company willing to send them but 100 grams of seed would have cost almost twenty pounds with the postage. My wife found some tarbais in a Jardiland in France a few weeks back - she's a good gal.

The peas have grown an inch (couple of centimetres) since the weekend. I whacked in some stakes and netted up one side and it looks really smart. But ran out of netting to do the other side. Planted thirty each of Triomphe de Farcey and Major Bush beans that I had germinated and brought on in my little greenhouse. They went between the two rows of peas on Sunday and sparingly applied slug pellets to give them a chance.
Looking closely at the peas and it looks like something’s having a go at the leaves. There are small semi circular notches taken out of a lot of the leaves. Most likely a mouse or maybe something bigger. I can't really lay traps about because my boys would somehow manage to stand on one or play with them when my back was turned. So they are welcome for now to a free nibble, as long as they don't start killing the seedlings because that would be a declaration of war.