Looks like we’re in for a couple of wild days of weather – it has been bucketing down for 36 hours and shows no sign of relenting. The stream through our swamp is now a raging torrent, the cats are refusing to put a paw outdoors and I can almost guarantee that our sheep will no doubt choose today to start lambing.
Luckily, we made good use of the fine (albeit grey) day on Saturday. Jason hoed over a good sized chunk of my vege patch and Mum helped me sow and transplant several rows of strawberries, peas and broad beans. Lucas helped too, if you call flinging dirt about and stealing my trowel help.
Last year I had two rows of ‘Camarosa’ strawberries in this particular corner of the garden. Now I have four; we divided up the crowns and replanted them in fresh mounds of soil enriched with a bag of strawberry food.
Then we sowed and transplanted: 2 rows of ‘Novella’ peas; a row of double Shirley poppy seedlings; 2 rows of ‘Exhibition Long Pod’ broad beans; a row of cauliflowers and broccoflowers; 2 rows of ‘Easy Peasy’ peas; a row of orange calendulas; 2 rows of ‘Greenfeast’ peas; a row of celery seedlings; 2 rows of crimson-flowered broad beans (I’m slowly bulking up my seeds of this unusual variety, though I’ll have to cover the plants when they start flowering to avoid cross-pollination); and 2 rows of climbing ‘Sugarsnap’ peas. (You may have guessed that I’m trialling all the different pea varieties, as I did with carrots last spring, to see which ones produce the best yields, the climbers or the dwarves.)
We also harvested a bowl of scrummy ‘Inca Gold’ yams. I planted the seed tubers two seasons ago, but didn’t get around to digging them up last winter (being somewhat preoccupied with a newborn baby). They popped up again last spring so I ignored them, then of course the 22 frosts we’ve had so far this winter dealt to their tender oxalis-like foliage and they died down without trace a few weeks ago. Jason was busy digging the soil over when he unearthed them. “Oh wow,” I said. “We’ve got yams!” “Oh,” replied Jason, “is that what they are? I thought they were Jerusalem artichokes so I was trying to dig them back in before you noticed.”
Bless ‘im. I’ve clearly forced him to eat enough Jerusalem artichokes this winter to last a lifetime.