Potato planting

And there are our potatoes sitting in their egg boxes in which they have been ‘chitted’ for the last few weeks in my kitchen. Chitting is pre-sprouting your tubers in the warm before planting them which, theoretically at least, can give them a head start.

We were extremely lucky with the weather yesterday, getting the one sunny day in the last two weeks of grey clouds and rain – so were soon stuck in to digging over and fertilising the old potato bed.

And here are the tubers in their trench, just waiting to be covered in soil.

We actually had too many potatoes for that bed so some of them moved over to our new bed beside the path which they will have to share with some broad beans – going in right now.

Elsewhere in the garden things are growing, if very slowly. So here is our little broccoli patch. We do have some small heads but you will see that other ocupants of the garden have had a good meals on its leaves.

And the onions and spring onions are all growing, slowly…

While down at the fruit end, the raspberries are showing signs of life – and here comes our rhubarb!

Obviousy, all that hard work deserved a reward, so we got the fire pit going so we could toast some muffins and hot cross buns. Very welcome they were too.

And while we were drinking tea and munching muffins a snail thought he would take a look at our ‘beans’ sign!

MEANWHILE, OVER IN BOUNDS GREEN……

The Urban Forest Tribe has moved into a wonderful patch of wild behind the Sunshine Garden Centre. The whole area belongs to the Scouts but Paula now has taken over a sizeable chunk to use both for her own groups and to ‘let out’ to other forest groups in need of wild space. But before that can happen the construction team of Steve and Stephen who did such an amazing job on our planters, path and pond, have been hard at work.

This is the bridge which takes you from the main scouts’ area into Paula’s space – and this is to be the new, and very spacious, mud kitchen!

I joined them at Saturday for a heavy duty ivy clearing morning and here is a very muddy Paula with some of the kids spreading wood chippping on the paths that we cleared.

It is such an fabulous space – right in the middle of a really built up area. What fun it is going to be when it is all up and running in a couple of months!