​Preparing the ground

Monday afternoon 6th March
Having spent the morning giving myself a headache booking flights online, I decided I needed the fresh air down on the plot despite a forecast of rain.
I started by setting up the bin extensions on the middle compost bin and emptying my kitchen waste onto the current, left hand bin. When I get the time and inclination I will start digging out the right hand bin and shovelling the contents over into the extended middle bin so the compost gets a good mixing. Hopefully I shall finish up with a bin full of lovely dark and crumbly compost next autumn.
I then moved on to finishing off digging over the raspberry bed path. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of worms in the soil and the absence of raspberry roots. However I realised that I was digging alongside the 'Polka' raspberries, which are a recent hybrid, not the relocated old raspberries from the back of the plot. The modern hybrids seem to be less likely to send out underground runners. Perhaps I should think about buying in some more hybrids.
I did gather a bucketful of weeds and a few roots which I shall have to dispose of, not compost.
Then I moved into the brassica tunnel. Two cauliflowers were developing nicely but will still grow bigger, I hope.

​ The other side is where I want to plant my first early potatoes so I started taking off the old mulch of horse litter. It scraped off quite easily and had broken down to a great extent so I shovelled it into the barrow and added it to the compost to balance the first of this year's bags of grass cuttings from a neighbour at home.

​It is always good to maintain a balance of green and brown material when making compost. This is not always easy to do but I plan to use some of my leaves as a source of brown stuff during the summer.

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Then I dug over the strip and was again very pleased at the number of worms. I think I shall have to move the small cabbage plants over to the new Brassica patch so I can move the tunnel as soon as the cauliflowers are finished.


Finally, before harvesting, I hoed the weeds off the curly kale and spring cabbages and the asparagus bed producing a heap of weeds and earth which I added to the compost bin.





As the sun set and it started to get dark I picked some Brussel tops from the plants that had produced no sprouts and a good helping of nice tight sprouts from the other plants. There was also a picking of purple sprouting broccoli from two plants at the back of the patch. I then dug up some leeks to go with the parsnips given to me by a neighbour clearing a patch for his potatoes. They were not big but they were perfectly formed which is more than I can say for the ones I am growing!
Once again I left in semi-darkness, locking the gate as I was obviously the last to leave yet again!

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