I have finally sown some vegetables, parsnips and some broad beans. It's not much, but it's a start. And I finished weeding the asparagus bed, trying to tease out the two different sorts of running weed grass that have infiltrated, one with thin, wiggly roots and the other with fat straight ones. There are absolutely no signs of any asparagus coming up, and it was neglected last year, but maybe it's still too early. It seeds itself around the garden, where I tend to leave it through a combination of aesthetics and idleness, the foliage being quite ornamental and the roots difficult to extract. I have read of asparagus coming back after ploughing, so with any luck having to compete with weeds for one summer won't have killed ours. I weeded it beautifully the year before, and Strulched the bed, and filled in the gaps with new young plants, but then came a savage dry spell and I'm not sure how many of the replacement plants survived.
I have a plan of what is supposed to go in which bed, worked out on a piece of paper. Classic rotations as set out in the books ignore the possibility that one side of your vegetable patch might be shadier than the other, and my plan was based mainly on going through Dr Hessayon's Vegetable Book and seeing what demanded a sunny site, and what only had to be reasonably sunny. One of the beds nearest the hedge was already earmarked for salad leaves, since I knew they liked a little shade in summer, and the sweetcorn was destined for the sunniest bed, but that left some juggling in the middle. Dr Hessayon is amazingly gung-ho about chemicals, telling the reader to dust the soil against various pests with this and that product, most of which are probably no longer on sale. Our vegetables will have to take their chances with wire worms, but I am planning to fleece against leek moth, carrot root fly, and whatever it was that riddled my turnips with black holes the last time I grew any. And I will need to net the purple sprouting broccoli against pigeons, if I ever get that far.
The surface of the freshly weeded beds is of course a snare and a delusion, since it is chock full of weed seeds. It has largely been the weeding that's overwhelmed me in previous years. That, and the watering. We'll see.
The Systems Administrator had a bonfire, since the wind was blowing from the east to take the smoke into the wood and not out over the lettuce field or down to the neighbouring cottages, so the utility area is looking a little tidier than it was. There is plenty more stuff to come down from the meadow to burn, though, largely bramble stems, both the wild ones and the terrifying Rubus cockburnianus. It would be helpful if the weather could warm up enough for the SA to feel like mending the garden tractor, so that we could use it to cart the debris down in the trailer. It currently has major carburettor problems and a knackered tyre, but there's no point in getting a new tyre for it until we see if it's possible to fix the fuel system. But it would be more pleasant crawling around on the concrete working on the engine if temperatures would at least nudge into double figures.
It felt chilly today, and still not as though there was any great rush to sow things outside. I'll try and do a bit more over the course of next week, though. It must warm up soon, and before I know where I am it will suddenly be late April.
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