April 17th - First crop being planted out
The weather had been good, the activity levels high, the soil being prepared.
As you can see in the first picture, potatoes are going in. Maybe the troughs weren’t that deep, maybe we shouldn’t have used manure, perhaps watering wasn’t necessary but we did them all anyway!
Where did we get the potatoes from? The supermarket - and they had already started growing roots in the bag before we put them in the ground. But there is a little extra story here.
Although we had made a start on all three growing patches, we focused on the one nearest the polytunnel, this is where we intended to sow the potatoes anyway. This second weeding business was easier than pre-Christmas, but boy oh boy weren't there plenty of them lots of small tuber-like plants which we eventually found out were in fact edible (much much much later it was, like in November, when we did discover this, but tiny though too, hardly potatoes!)
We also sowed carrots and parsnips straight into the soil. Maybe a little early but hey ho, let’s hope something comes of them.
In the meantime we had a pile of manure delivered! I (Desi) was singing and dancing in excitement at the sight of it and surprised myself there - never in my life had I ever imagined it possible that I could be so happy over a pile of stinky shit!
We ordered the manure up because we felt the soil could benefit from some extra support, perhaps some fiber. It looked like an onerous pile, but we figured if we dug this into the soil as we went over it again (the second time ) that it would help along our first growing season on the plot.
