Thursday, July 16, 2009

Of Cabbages and Pens


"The time has come to speak of cabbages -and pens-
And why the tea is cold—
And whether slugs have souls.”


Spent about 3 hours the other day building two pens to keep the cabbages from escaping to attack the pigeons. Having seen the cauliflowers devastated by the pigeons I would be quite willing to go out shooting pigeons. Greedy little dunderheads.

I didn't realise I had so many cabbages in the seed bed. Planted out 30 odd assorted cabbages, january Kings as the label tells me. But courtesy of the numpties at B&Q where I bought the tags and a pen, the name was washed off the label; the pen wasn't water proof, numpties.

The cabbages were a little large, some of them, to be transplanting as they seemed to have quite a large tap root, and they wilted quite quickly, but I gave them a good water and we'll see.

There's still a truck load of red cabbages to take up to the other allotment, another twenty or so. if all these cabbages come good, well we'll be cabbaged out.

I also sowed a few lines of swede; a bit late but we'll see.

1 comment:

Bob said...

I saw on the TV recently this guy only nets the top of the cabbages etc., he only puts a few strands of string around the outside. I haven't tried this myself but I may do next year. What I want to know is why do they make the points on the marker pens so thick? By the time I get finished I may as well have just coloured in the whole label black! Actually I recently found one with a nice fine point now so now read what I planted. I think the cabbages you planted will pick up after a few days, they often go all limp after being moved. Bob.