Although this weekend in the UK is a Bank Holiday I did not get any significant extra time at the lottie. H went to a East Midlands air ambulance fund raiser on Friday evening. We had thought that we would go for a long walk on Saturday but H's knees were not up to it having danced all Friday night. I went to the lottie for the greater part of the day. I had a few jobs to do but the major job was to plant the main crop spuds. I had the the Cara's [main crop variety] chitting in the shed for the past month. Some folks think it is a bit late to be planting spuds. If you were to look around the fields near me you will still find machines working the fields planting spuds. I did figure that I could not delay much longer.
I had ten rows, five rows each of earlies, of spuds already in bed B. I counted the spuds I had, weeded out the damaged or weak seed spuds and came up with enough spuds for nine rows of main crop. I set out the string and set to digging the first trench. Having got the first row in I reckoned that I could probably squeeze in seven more rows. That was the case. Dropping a row just meant sorting the spuds again to have the best seed spuds available. I dug the rows a bit closer that the prevailing wisdom but to compensate I dug them in deeper. Despite the dryer weather the soil at ten inches deep was quite moist. It took me ages to get them all in. I had a few visitors to break up the work.
Having finished the spuds I moved onto the Broccoli patch. I picked over the remaining sprouting tips before digging up the last of the plants. I took the plants to the big compo bin and chopped them up before feeding the bin. Then back to the patch to dig it over to remove the few weeds. When I finished the digging I hoed the weeds off the adjacent area to the broccoli then got busy with the rake to level the top third of bed D in readiness for root crops.
I had a tray full of Hispi cabbage, that I grown at Mo's, ready for planting out. I soaked the tray and went about prepping the area of Bed A where I had previously dug in the Clover. There were a few dock showing through so I went round the bed a dug them out. Cabbage like very firm soil. I trampled the ground, raked the soil, trampled it again then more raking. The bed came up flat and fine. Then it was just a case of planting out the eighteen Hispis and watering them in. The soil that had that the clover dug in was at least an inch if not two inches higher than the adjacent area that had no green manure. It will be interesting to see if the Clover makes any other difference.
A few more Asparagus spears were ready so I harvested them and had them for breakfast on Sunday with Eggs and toast. That set me up for the rest of the day. We went to Shrewsbury to have lunch with H's Mum. It was just as well because it had been raining over night. It saved me watering duty. We dined at a nice pub a few miles from Shrewsbury and to our surprise H's sister and hubby turned up out of the blue, which was nice.
Monday we went for the walk, postponed from Saturday. We went to Hartington in the Peak district and did a circular walk out to Longnor and back.
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