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.

Salad Days

Naff headline but I have been sowing lots os salad in the back garden, along dome radish d'avignon, spinach, bella?, along with perpetual spinach and some nero broccoli, a little late but there you go, and a few lines of the beetroots, red ace and the bolthardy.

This afternoon I should make some sowings of swede, magres, that well late like, but what you going about it like, yeah and some spring cabbages, advantage and durham early.

That is all folks.

Oh and I tidied up my pots and planted a small herb bed, oh turned the compost, both bins, sigh.

Courgette a Go Go

The courgettes look like they're taking off. there are two types there an Italian striped one and errr another one, I'll get back to you on that.

Pain de L'eau

It's turning out like Jean de Florette; the tanks were running dry last week. Mmmmm some sort of water rationing going on. I arrived at the tank with me cans and all i saw was a dead donkey lying in the bottom, oh well that may be an exaggeration, but it was certainly pretty low. I had to go on the prowl to other tanks to get some.

I also sprayed the potatoes with Bordeaux, it's expensive but it keeps away the blight, though the Gentlemen of the Can who invade the allotments to suck on my potato leaves are a bit of a problem. That was on July 3, so fingers crossed I'll do that again in two weeks, 17 ish.

I have also augmented the pumpkins and marrows that I put out earlier with more pumpkins from the seed saved last year. Since I saw how strong the runner bean plants looked, which were from seed saved last year, I'm converted to saving my seed. Fnnaaar.

Picked the peas on the eden allotment, but about a quarter had pea moth caterpillars in them. That took a while to sort out those nasty little beggars; I'm going to compost them having drowned the caterpillars in a bucket of water.

Also picked a load of green goosberries, so I might have a tart tonight or possibly a fool. Ther was a bit of a small rain storm when I was picking, but that made a nice change, these days.