This weekend, I did actually get to the plot, and worked on the plot.
First up was collection, I picked tomatoes and discovered blight on the tumbling toms, so up they came. Without Ma there to keep me on task, I get distracted and so pulling up the tomatoes turned to weeding the paths and trimming back the mint and the blackcurrant sage and removing some of the tomato plants that were done. I have ADHD on the plot but it is productive!
Then I got that tricky middle section of the plot, I weeded the paths and trimmed the tree spinach. You can now get from the main path to the asparagus and sweet potatoes without needing a machete! It’s not perfect and there is more to do, but it’s clearer from the blueberries to the blackcurrants.
The plot is clearly good for blackcurrants while I was clearing, I noticed that a branch I’d trimmed and stuck in a pot in the spring has taken root and the biggest of my blackcurrant bushes had made a baby! No I don’t know where I’d put them either!
I topped up the old potato bed and my plan for that had been kale but I had garlic and it didn’t require me to go and find nets, so most of the garlic went in. You know when I harvested garlic in May, I said that I would plant less garlic for next season. Yeah, that’s not happening. I bought four bulbs each of extra early wight and rhapsody wight. Which broke down into 61 cloves and I had 19 cloves of elephant garlic! Right now I have a bed of elephant garlic (nine cloves) and another with 45 of the other types. The rest of the elephant garlic is going in the bed I’ve just cleared of tumbling toms but it needs a bit more of a tidy up.
The other cloves of the rhapsody wight and extra early wight are going into the sweet potato bed when that’s finished in October. That bed as a bind weed issue so having the garlic in there will give me a reason to keep on top of it in winter and spring.
What else, I trimmed back the chamomile and alpine strawberries and topped that bed up with compost and planted some salad burnet in the corner.
I also finally got round to planting out my echinacea, I want things next to the beds because I think it’s pretty and just paths would be boring, this is sunseekers rainbow. On the next bed over, I planted some santolina ‘lemon fizz’, if I’m honest, I don’t hold out much hope for them, they were delivered by Parcelforce and all of them were out of their pots when they arrived, we’ll see if they survive the winter.
Finally, I potted up the heath pearlwort. I was going to plant it in the ground but was reading about making it bigger by potting up so it’ll cover more area when it goes in. Fingers crossed.
That was it for work, I did collect purple sprouting broccoli and some summer squash and I watered the poly.
Next week, I want to move the compost to the back, finish weeding under the plum tree, sort out what I’m doing with my bucket of bulbs and start on sorting out the strawberry towers. If I have time and the weather is good I need to paint the shed too. It’s gonna need a couple of coats and clear out before winter!
And I need to work on this chaos
Nic Dempsey 