At Last - A Dry Weekend

I can’t believe it, a whole week without any rain, well nearly, it rained a bit on Friday night, but hey we’ll let it off as it was dry all week and then also dry for the rest of the weekend. My plot has nearly gone from a boggy mess to a cloggy mess. Hopefully if it keeps like this it’ll just be a mess that needs sorting.

So to update you all on the weekend’s happenings, on Saturday morning I put 8 seed potatoes (Rocket) into 2 potato containers (4 in each) and put them in the large plastic greenhouse. I’ve put them on top of some pallets just to keep them off the cold concrete floor; I thought this might help keep the chill/frost off them. I also sowed some carrots (Early Nantes 5) under the little grow house which I’ve had placed over the 4x4 raised bed in the back yard. On Saturday afternoon, Caleb, Samson and I went to Redcar beach to collect some seaweed, read somewhere that it’s good for the potatoes so I thought I’d give this a go. I’ll plant some with a seaweed bed and some without and let you know the results.

Sunday I finally managed to finish Samson’s kennel, he’s currently sleeping in the kitchen whilst I’m at work, sleeping is what he does best, but now the weather is getting better I thought it would be nice if he could spend time outside and basque in the glorious sun (when it arrives), so I started to build him a kennel but then with all the bad weather I’d not been able to finish it off, well now that’s complete and he loves it. He was even sleeping in it whilst I was nailing the roof felt onto it, nothing interrupts his sleep! Now all we’ve got to teach him not to panic when he’s outside, as he doesn’t particularly like it, it’s not the being outside that upsets him, it’s the door being closed and him not being able to get back in that he doesn’t like. So it’ll have to be a slow, confidence building exercise I think until he’s comfortable staying outside on his own.

Me and Samson also spent a couple of hours at the plot on Sunday afternoon, it was wonderful! I dug over the small brassica bed, so now they’ve all been dug; I’ll add some lime shortly. I used my new cultivator (a xmas pressie from my Mam) to rake over the muck in the legume beds. I then started to weed the area where the potato bed is going to go, the mud was still very wet, but at least the boggy bit was starting to dry up, all the puddles have gone, it was just very cloggy. Its forecast to be dry all week so hopefully we can get down at the weekend to get on with a bit more.

Oh yes, something I couldn’t resist buying, even though I didn’t really need any more seeds, some Broccoli (Calabrese) - Samson. I wonder if these will grow big heads, as big as Samson himself, we’ll see!