On a glorious sunny day where better a place is there to be, than outside in the garden? Everything in full go mode. All the trees have buds emerging, flowers have opened up like Daffodils and its just an explosion of life. Well today was one such day.
Having been 2 weeks since my last visit to the allotment to plant my first early spuds, carrots and parsnips it was time to make the most of the sunshine and crack on with things and plant the second earlies (going to be eating a lot of potato salad this year if all goes well!). Having not sown any peas a fortnight ago as originally planned I made the decision that today I would plant them straight into the ground rather than sowing them first and planting out later.
Before heading off to the allotment I decided that today would also be a good day to do a bit of garden maintenance and also to sow my salad crops at home. This was decision I made at the beginning that I would grow my salad crops at home and use the allotment plot for the growing of vegetables and fruit.
Got the salads sown and lawn mowed so it was off to the plot. Things are not quite going exactly to plan but that’s not particularly a bad thing. My vision of having everything all sorted and a perfect, immaculately laid out plot just isn’t feasible as I am trying to keep down the cost in case I’m unable to continue with it.
On the list for today was the planting of the 2nd earlies and also some peas. Following the instructions on the seed packet I created 3 flat bottomed drills approx 5cm deep by 5cm width. I did this by using a handy wooden steak/post about a foot long which seemed perfect for the job. I did 3 drills each approx 100 cm apart and placed the pea seeds (dried peas from what i can gather) in the drills about 5cm between each one.
With the peas sorted it was time to do the spuds. I remember as a kid helping my dad in the garden that he had a special tool for planting potatoes. It had two long handles and a V shaped end that you put a seed potato into and then plunged it into the soil. Using the handles to lever open the V this created a hole and the seed potato would then drop out into the hole you had made. This gave me an idea. Using a piece of hollow metal pipe/pole i decided to use the same sort of principle by using it to drill down in the soils to create a hole into which I placed a seed potato before then filling back in over the top. Why did a whole trench when you can just dig a hole for each one? Hopefully it will work. But that’s part of the fun is the experimenting.