Sunshine Hit Me!

Free Advice

The good weather over the weekend really bought out lots of fellow plotters. The warm weather also encouraged people to stop and chat. It was good to once again be able to discuss plans and swap some tips.

It’s easy enough to look up advice on the internet, but there really is no substitute for guiding someone to a particular area of your plot and asking their opinion there and then.

Every Grain of Sand

A quick trip to the builders’ merchants bagged us a few more sacks of sharp sand. This has been liberally scattered over the beds on our plot and duly dug in.

Experiments with this last week gave inconclusive results, but we can only see it benefitting us in the long run.

As we said in a previous post, it’s hard to tell what is of most benefit to the soil – the addition of sharp sand, compost, manure, repeated digging or simply that it’s drying out.

In reality it’s got to be a combination of all of those. If each improves the soil by only 10% we’re onto a good thing.

Life Under Glass

Activity in the coldframe continues in a satisfactory manner. Along with the seedlings we’ve mentioned in previous posts, we can now also see the beginnings of carrots, iceberg lettuce, celery, coriander and tomatoes.

Slugs now seems to have found the coldframe so we’ll need to remedy that state of affairs. The slugs are only small at the moment, but then so are our seedlings.

Another uninvited visitor to the coldframe is, presumably, a mouse. Or mice. It’s amazing just how small a gap they can fit through before they do their best to dig up as many seeds as possible.

We haven’t done anything about this yet. Suppose we’ll always lose some seeds to the local wildlife – all part of the process.

Having said that, if the mice crank up their level of destruction another few notches our laissez-faire attitude is likely to change quickly.