For the last couple of days I have pedalled down in the evening to water in the greenhouse and the rows of seeds I have sown. I have sown three short rows of leeks, Musselburgh, Jolant and Lyon. The last is a packet of free seed from Kitchen Garden, the second is an early leek I grew last year with some success and the first is my attempt to grow a standard leek. I expect I shall buy a bunch of Musselburgh leeks from the Trading Hut as I did last year when mine failed.
Last night I sowed my parsnips, very late but not too late. 
However I first needed to clear weeds from the patch before sowing and got a barrowload of weeds to put in the compost. When you leave weeds to grow to any size it takes a great deal of effort to remove them. Despite having a stable litter mulch I needed to use the fork to lever each clump of weeds out of the ground before raking everything up, forking into the barrow and delivering to the compost heap.
Again I sowed several rows, partly because I found I had not bought fresh seed of my standard, White Gem. For some reason I had two opened packets from last year but in addition I had another free packet from Kitchen Garden of 'Tender & True' and a bought packet from Kings (via my RHAA order) of an F1 variety 'Palace'. I alternated the rows between the old and new seed so I don't get a big gap if the old seed fails.
I then set up boards to shade the rows so watering is more effective. The bed looks as though it is covered with a giant Venetian blind!

​My son (and helper) visited in between and cleared a large patch of weeds for me and took away the last of the celeriac as well as some asparagus.
Saturday, however, I drove down even though all I planned was watering because I had spent all day in the garden catching up with sowing and moving stone. Cycling would have been too strenuous. While watering I managed to deal with all the rubbish that had built up as well.

​Monday afternoon, my normal session on the plot, was meant to be a sowing session for all the seeds I should have sown already. However, the wind was so strong sowing was out of the question if I was to get the seeds in the drill.
So I decided to use the lawn mowings collected from one of my neighbours on my still-to-be-dug runner bean trench. Before that, though, I needed to remove the weeds and manure so I was clear to dig.
Unfortunately I had left the weeds to get established so I needed a fork to loosen their roots first. It was a long tedious job and there was a huge amount for the compost bin!


Digging the trench took me only a few minutes once I had cleared the patch and the manure I had moved aside was forked into the bottom. On top I spread the grass cuttings but left it open to subside a little before returning the soil.











​I then moved on to hand weeding the asparagus bed. 

​​Before leaving I watered the seeds sown a few days ago and the tomatoes newly planted in the greenhouse.