I had grand plans for the weekend on the plot but honestly it was too windy, things were zooming across the plot. But we now have all three beds in, if not filled.
I cut the verbena back but decided to leave the rosemary until next month.
We harvested kale, leeks and chard and got very excited about the new leaves/buds on the gooseberries, raspberries, plum tree, blueberries and rhubarb.
I had my usual March/April envy of Dennis’ rhubarb (which he doesn’t even like!)
Hopefully over the next two weeks, the weather will co-operate and we’ll get more done.
- Build new bed
- Sow celery, leeks, sweet peas and beetroot (indoors to go into cloche once up and growing!)
- Trim the rosemary and verbena bonariesis
- Have a bonfire
- Sow peas, spring onions, carrots and parsley (outdoors later in March)
- Tidy edges of the plot – nearly there
- Grease bands on the plum tree
- Paint the shed inside and out
- Plant up the walking onions
- Plant potatoes in sacks (mid month)
- Sort out a water but
- Fill all the new beds with compost
- Dig up lemon balm and put in pot
This was a free Amazon monthly read and I really wanted to like it but I didn’t. It started off fairly well but the politics of the world weren’t clear enough for me to understand what the hell was going on. It felt muddled and messy and as it’s a trilogy, the end was ambiguous but I’m not interested enough to continue.
This was also a free Amazon monthly read. Although this has been tagged as a book about how McGrady took in the birth parents of her adopted daughter, it’s more than that. The birth parents living with her and her daughter is the dramatic part of the story but it’s not the entire story, which is about why McGrady wanted to be and then how she became a parent. It reads quite distant. I’m beginning to think this is a cultural different in American and British writing styles, I notice it more in journalism. McGrady writes about how she met her husband and married him and then broke up with him without ever really acknowledging her role in the breakup of his previous marriage, or the possible alcoholism that led to her leaving him. It could be that in trying to tell her story and be respectful of others, but it leaves you with the feeling that she’s trying to hard to be blameless. There are things that she clearly doesn’t want to or can’t write about; her marriage and what seems to be the mental illness of at least one of her daughter’s birth parents. There are lots of assumptions about adopted children that I’m not sure that I agree with. I’m not sure that all children have a primal wound from the adoption process, some may struggle but to view adopted children as ‘broken’ from the beginning of the process seems wrong. We don’t say that about children born of surrogates (well at least not that I’ve seen) or of children who have dead parents. We acknowledge that there could be issues and address them, an example is in the book she made adoption so normal in her home, that her kid didn’t realise that not all children were adopted!
There was some epic work on the allotment but not much else going on. This week, there’s Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent and I’m in Southampton for a team day on Thursday, which will entail spending some time at Ma’s (Wed and Thursday!), finally I’m having a haircut on Friday! So it’s not madly exciting but it will be busy.
While I was faffing with new beds and planting things, Ma was weeding and tidying the edges of the plot. The allotment committee is trying to get all of the border paths straight and I noticed that my lovely plot neighbour Tana had straightened ours which was great but we need to get to work on the other side too.
Another week has passed and I’ve still not managed to sow a seed! But I have got a work list for March, I still think we’re in really good shape for the spring so it’s not a long or difficult list.
Nic Dempsey 