April comes to an end

Last report for April. What's happened this month ? Well, a lot of repair work to the raised beds. They are now 7 years old and some of them are beginning to rot away. I have patched most of them, but next year I think we'll have to re-make many of them. Moral of this story: wood and soil do not go well together. No matter how much preservative you put on, the woodlice will chew at the wood and eat it. There's one more bed to repair which I will do next week.

Trish has now put her peas, runner beans and sweet peas in. There's some Little Gem lettuce too. All the earlier plantings are looking good - and the cauliflowers and savoy cabbages (always a bit twitchy) are looking very healthy. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed for the club root to stay away.

I put two more rows of spuds in - that's all the spuds planted for 2009. The first earlies, which I put in about 6 weeks ago are now beginning to show.

We have a big new "civil engineering" project nearly completed. I have got so peed off with the pigeons (and other birds) eating everything that's not under netting that I decided to make a walk-in cage. It's nearly finished -- just got to put the net over, which we'll do early May, then it will be ready for cauliflowers, cabbage, broccoli, sprouts, courgettes and black kale which will be coming from the nursery in about a weeks time. Pictures when it's all done. We dug up a big patch of flowers to make room for the cage. In these credit crunch times, things you can eat are more important than things you can look at.

I'm also taking up some of the black material Trish laid down a couple of years ago to supress the weeds on the paths and replacing it with paving slabs. Our next door neighbours (at home) had a pile ( 44 to be exact) of slabs they did not want, so I have ferried them down to the allotty and have started to lay them. Keeps the weeds down a reat and good to walk on. Pictures when it's all finished.

At home I have sweet corn ready to plant out - probably do that next week. The squash have just germinated in the propagator, but the dwarf french beans seem very reticent - no show yet after two weeks. I'll give 'em another week then if nothing has happened, it will be plan B - throw them away and get some from the nursery.

I also have a lot of sunflowers which have just germinated. We usually scatter a few around, but last year we didn't get round to it. So a special effor this year ! They will be planted out in about two weeks time.

We should be through this big bulge of effort in a week or so, then we can relax a bit - there'll be "just" the routine weeding and tidying up to do