weeds and water

Yesterday's forecast heavy rain starting at one in the morning and continuing as light rain until lunchtime didn't materialise, any more than the previous forecast day of rain.  All we've had are savage, drying winds and a couple of the lightest of showers, so today saw me out with the hose.  I ran it on the Charlotte potatoes as I spread mushroom compost over the asparagus bed and searched to see if there were any flowers for cutting among the weeds.  I watered the young lettuces (good), the salad leaves (OK-ish), the broad beans (passable), the sweetcorn, beans and courgettes (weather beaten), leaf beet (slightly shell shocked) and the parsnips (debatable).  Later on I spent an hour playing the hose over the cultivated bits of the railway gravel, stopping and counting to forty when I identified anything recently planted.

I think the carrots and leeks are a write-off.  They weren't very good before something ate them, and they're worse now.  The solution for next year is probably to raise the leeks in modules, not planting them out until they're pencil size (a small pencil), to sow the carrots along trickles of potting compost so that I can see where they ought to be, and to have fleece and weights ready to hand so that I can cover both beds immediately.  And then keep them weeded, of course.  I can't even remember where the beetroot is supposed to be, but I'm sure it hasn't come to anything.

I am afraid it is going to take a little persistence before I learn to love vegetable gardening, though maybe it will be more rewarding if I manage to grow at least something to a size where we can eat it.  I am trying to imagine how delightful it will be to work on my vegetable patch, surrounded by swelling crops looking like the lush pictures of kitchen gardens in the magazines, but at the moment I mainly seem to have drought, pest damage, wind damage, and a never-ending supply of weeds that are growing faster than I can pull them out.

In the cutting bed I identified a promising row of Anemone coronaria, only for it to peter out half way along.  Next to it the two rows of double Ranunculus were amazingly thick and leafy, once I'd disentangled the fat hen from them.  After that was a label saying Calendula 'Bronze Beauty', but only one plant that was identifiable as a Calendula.  I don't think broadcast annuals are going to work.  I need rows, and I might use the same compost trick as for the carrots, if I try again.  It's recommended for carrots partly because the emerging seedlings are very easily stopped in their tracks if rain causes the soil to cap, and sowing in potting compost prevents that, but it does also provide a location clue to distinguishing desired plants from weeds.

All in all it seems like a lot of work so far, when I could have gone and bought a lettuce and a bunch of flowers in Waitrose.  But if I keep at it I should get the hang of it.  Meanwhile I didn't manage to cut any of the lawn edges at all.  It would help if it would rain, preferably at night). Hours spent carefully manoeuvring the hose round corners so as not to snap or crush any stems or flowers, and searching out recent plantings among the jungle that will probably die if not watered, do eat into productive gardening time.