(initially posted on my blog by mistake. Whoops)

After hearing excited tales about planting cabbages in collars (which conjures up some interesting images, but is far more mundane than it could be!) I headed off to the garden during my free(ish) lesson this afternoon. Suddenly the garden has been transformed from empty soil to heaving beds in a matter of weeks. Everything seems to be looking ok, apart from one or two broad beans (slugged), one garlic (stunted and probably dead) and the blackcurrants, which have some leaves that are sporting a slightly worrying raised brown patch. I don't think it's Big Bud, but I've not been able to find pictures to be sure, so any blackcurrant experts out there, please help!

In addition to planting more veg than you can shake the proverbial stick at*, Rob and I built a proper fruit cage over the blackcurrants and the gooseberry bush. Girly-guidey square lashing seems to have come in useful, for once! The only problem with all this gardening is that I want to harvest the stuff NOW. NOW, I tell you. Harrumph.

* This sentence is a contender for the Crap Subclause Award 2006.

Into the ground

Things wot we have actually planted in the soil:

Potatoes (Valour and Pink Fir Apple)


Onions (red and white)


Broad beans (Express and something else)


Carrots (eskimo and parano - I think)


Things wot are waiting for the proper soil:

Tomatoes


Peas


Things wot were growing in the soil but shouldn't have been:

Potatoes, growing in the legume bed, that definitely weren't planted by us!

A Tale of Two Compost Heaps

When we took over the garde, we inherited two piles of what can only loosely be described as compost. A couple of weeks ago, Julia and I did some compost redistribution (which is like income redistribution but more crumbly) and emptied the useable compost out of one of the heaps. Last weekend was the turn of the second heap. The evil grass-slime was both grassy and slimy, and looked like this:



By the time Rob and I had finished with it, having moved it from heap two to heap one and added plenty of shredded newspaper and compost activator, it looked more like this:





It's now covered up and starting to heat up nicely, so hopefully we've made something useful from the slime.