Green amongst the brown

With Kasia away for the weekend, I spent a thoroughly enjoyable Saturday afternoon by myself at the plot. The weather was mostly gorgeous, with just the odd shower punctuating the azure ether, which helped, but I also realised a couple of things about this plot which just make it a more pleasant thing to garden than where we've been previously.

Firstly, the scale of thing. It's so much smaller than what we've dealt with previously. Added to the fact that we've divvied the thing into raised beds it makes it so much easier to keep on top of weeding. And, being on top of the weeding means that you don't feel guilty about taking an hour or so to digest the latest issue of The New Statesman in the sunshine, which just makes the whole experience that much more relaxing and less stressful. Whereas visits to the old plot sometimes felt like trying to sprint a marathon in order to get as much done in as short a time as possible, now it's possible to spend an afternoon pottering about, while still feeling that you've made some progress. And I'm all about the potter.

Toms in

The progress that I made consisted primarily of getting our fledgling tomato plants into buckets of compost and into the greenhouse/shed. It seems like they're going to get plenty direct sunlight in there. Not having access to any ground in which to grow them does mean spending quite a lot on compost, trays and feed etc. You could get a lot of very high quality tomatoes for the amount we've spent on our tomato infrastructure but hey ho, that's not the point is it?

Elsewhere, our one surviving pumpkin plant went into a patch next to the the compost bins. It's not looking too healthy, but will hopefully pull through. In rather better form were the couple of rows of cabbages I put in, which were Greyhound, a pointed variety that we've had some success with previously. I clean forgot to dig any lime into the soil, not that I had any kicking about anyhow, so we'll see how they deal with potential clubroot.

Also into the soil went some chard plantlings. Chard really is one of my very favourite things, so full of iron and flavour, so hopefully these will crack on.

It's a real pleasure to see flashes of green in among the plots that we dug through and sieved a bunch of times, removing all manner of grim esoteria. There were a good few times when, as spade met submerged paving slab for the umpteenth time, I'd had more than enough. But the reward is some insanely fine and clag-free tilth in which, so far at least, things seem to be happy to grow.