Tuesday, May 14th, 2002

Been slipping a bit about keeping up-to-date with just a few lines every week!   But the weather has been such that any entry in this diary would have been a grumble - about warm and dry April, and then a bitter wintry snap.   I was all set to resow almost every seed-bed - but this weekend, everything has finally shown through.

Pity that I had resown the beetroot - I hope the kids are going to enjoy eating beetroot morning noon and night for weeks, because we're going to have a huge crop!  

Spent the weekend weeding the onions and shallots, and breaking into a couple of compost heaps for the french beans and the squash beds; shifted enough to raise two twenty-foot beds about three inches!   Tonight, I rebuilt two heaps I want to compost fast, using the plastic "dalek" for the first time - we'll see how that goes.   Worked until well after sunset, in time to walk home under the finest sliver of the new crescent moon, and a bright Venus.

I felt obliged to put in the paragraph about what I've done - because truth to tell, I spent a VERY long time just wandering round looking at the seedlings breaking through; OK, I did a bit of thinning where necessary, and pulled the odd weed, but it really was wandering and wondering.   And I spent even more of the weekend sitting by the onion bed; listening to the birds, letting the sun soak into my back, VERY slowly weeding the onions by hand.  

Ladybirds everywhere.   Ten or fifteen every square yard.   First thoughts of self-congratulation ("what a healthy sign . . . lots of friendly bugs, because we're gardening organically") soon give way to panic.   What is the plentiful food-supply they have found so attractive?   Judging by the happy way they are celebrating their sex-lives so openly and frequently, these are some well-fed and optimistic bugs!

Butterflies too - tortoise-shells and red admirals I think I recognise, a white with orange tips to its front wings, and the first of the cabbage whites.   At least two types of bumble bee busy.   And a bee I don't know; it's a solitary bee, very similar in shape and size to a honey bee, but with a tawny red abdomen; they're building nests in tunnels in the sandy soil exposed by the fox's earth.   Masonry bees of some sort?  

Now there I am displaying near total entomological ignorance!

Wednesday, May 15th, 2002

I knew I had forgotten something last night - Asparagus!   What a revelation!

I had never tasted the real thing - packets of dehydrated "Cream of Asparagus" soup do not count.   But on Sunday, I cut my first shoots of my own asparagus bed.   Only ten of them, cos a vandal got to the first few before me - what pleasure the -------s got from slashing off my shoots and leaving them lying on the ground, I do not understand, but that's what they did.

But they didn't get this flush of asparagus shoots.   I cut the ten, and ran home, cooked them, and ate them with no more than a little butter.   Unbelievable - what a rich flavour, unlike any other vegetable I've tasted; beautiful.

Now I have a problem.   I MUST make more space for new plants!   Two years ago, another plot-holder had a few too many new crowns, and offered me some.   I didn't know what to do with them, but "chucked them in", in two beds.   The larger bed disappeared under weeds, but the smaller bed, of five plants, survived - and now I have tasted the results.   Hard work to get going?   Yes.   A long time to wait - two to three years?   Yes.   Worth the wait?   YES, YES, YES!.

If you have the chance to build an asparagus bed, don't think about it - do it!!!!!

Sunday, 26th May, 2002

At last - I'd run out of ideas for using spring cabbage in some new and tasty way.   As a family, we had our first proper meal off this year's harvest - lots of spinach thinnings, added to chick peas in a rich herby (fresh herbs!) tomato sauce, on a bed of boiled rice with LOTS of lemon balm.   "Better than gorgeous" said Halla - and she doesn't even like chick peas!

Everything seems to be coming through well - potatoes, pickling and spring onions, onions and shallots, beetroot, leeks, even the carrots (so far).   The first batch of French beans and the sweetcorn are sown.   And I planted the squash transplants today, and Halla's sunflowers.

Tamanna's peas are suffering heavy slug damage - but the brassica have been superb.   A real vindication (so far, touch wood! for not using slug pellets two years in a row.   Tamanna and I transplanted the romanesco, cabbages, broccoli, calabrese, cauliflowers, and calabrese last weekend.   And until today, we've only lost one transplant!

Under the enviromesh tunnel, I'd an 8 foot row of swedes sown, and 15 rows of brassica.   The slugs have taken the kale and the stonehead cabbage, almost all of them - but nothing else!  

So much for my own satisfactions today - the kids have a very different measure of "a good day".   The weather has been "unsettled" - a couple of rich, warm, heavy, soaking, but gentle showers came over.   Picnic lunch, in the allotment "shed" (an old army recruitment caravan!), in between the showers - makes it the best day they've had in the allotment all year!