Monday, May 28, 2007

Might even get some salad now

And finally for today (time to skedaddle home from work now, I've stayed late when I wasn't supposed to - have to run now to make it to a meeting of volunteers for the local tool shed)...here is what I got up to yesterday afternoon in between rain showers.
Actually, I was very lucky and the rain stayed away for a good three hours in the afternoon - it started to pour just as I was finishing putting away the bits and pieces I'd been using in the garden. Which explains this also slightly blurry picture (it's absolutely nothing to do with my shakiness and lack of skill - yet - with a digital camera. I swear!). Do you like it?

That part of the garden is where very little grows and so I made the bed by covering the yellow grass and mossy bits with cardboard and newspaper and piling topsoil and compost onto it. That was late last year and this year a few months ago I planted phacelia, a green manure crop. That seemed to grow well enough and I dug it in about three weeks ago. If you look closely in the background of this photo you can see the bed before I started putting up my mini-tunnel. This part of the garden gets almost no direct sun, maybe an hour a day, so I'm hoping to grow some salad crops and thought the tunnel might help a bit (not to mention keep the birds away. Of course, this way I also get to show off how well some of my courgette seedlings are doing :)

I planted some perpetual spinach, babyleaf lettuce, some more scallions, something I can't recall at the moment and then in the final section I planted out all the seedlings I started in April, most of which seemed to have just given up the ghost. It's a mixture of spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, a pea (maybe, it might be just something that was in the soil anyway as it only grew about 2cm) and all the other pots of soil which nothing grew in at all. I wasn't particularly careful about the planting either - if anything survives it survives and if it doesn't I'll consider it more manure for that patch. I plan to start more seeds inside this evening - it's pretty late in the year to be doing it but with the weird hot then cold then warm again weather it's probably worth a try anyway.

2 comments:

Melanie Rimmer said...

What a great way to reclaim a plot of poor soil. I hope you do get some salad from it. Keep us posted how it grows.

Phelan said...

I really wish I could use a tunnel out here. The Kansas wind is brutal on them.