It's All Gone Quiet Again

Another Mid-May, another snarl up.

Over the past few years I've had a suspected mini stroke, a bullying by my boss so bad I quit my job (a bit rash, but I didn't want to face him ever again), a fall that jarred my back & left me out of action most of the Summer, and now my old knee injury (thanks Network Rail & your "wait till we're sued" station & staircase repair policy) has flared up so badly I can only comfortably walk in it 1 day in 5.  The plus side is that I've become a dab hand at applying cohesive bandage.  Have another GP appointment next week, hopefully he'll be able to get me referred to see a specialist and after 19 years of problems, finally get it fixed.

Howard now has a new job, as a cargo bike courier for an ethical, zero emissions, delivery company.  Obviously doesn't pay as well as graphic design, but at least it's something, and I get to call him a professional cyclist.  Plus the company has a contract with OrganicLea, so he gets to visit there at least once a week and look around for inspiration while he's waiting to load up (he also gets to drive an electric van for bigger loads), plus sometimes comes home with unsold items from the farmer's market.  The other week he returned with a bag of sorrel leaves, which I used with chopped onions & ransoms leaves as a bed to lightly braise some white fish on, topped with more chopped sorrel & ransoms flowers in melted butter.

On his days off, Howard has worked hard to keep the allotment chugging along on time.  All the potatoes, onion, garlic & shallots for the year are planted, and he's getting other seedlings planted as & when ready.

Not been the greatest year for seed sowing, due to the various cold snaps putting a check on growth.  A mouse got into the mini greenhouse where my peas & broad beans were, and had a feast.  Pumpkin cat went to look for it, but to have a staring match rather than actually catch it.  I've got another batch sown, plus the few surviving peas planted around a tripod in a container in the back garden, so we will have some in due course.

The wall of salad when first planted up

After the mini heatwave in February, I thought I'd risk starting off my tomatoes & peppers in the first half of March, rather than the last week.  Hardly anything germinated, then the back-up sowing I did in early April got hit by the cold snap after Easter.  A few things have germinated now, but I'm annoyed at the wasted time, effort & materials on the whole.  Galling that out of a whole tray, I have just one Gardeners' Delight seedling, for instance.  But at least that's something I can buy as a plant fairly easily.

We've been harvesting salad leaves with great regularity though.  I used the large vertical plant stand we bought from Ikea a couple of years back and filled it with pots of salad leaf mixes, plus a couple of pots each of spring onions & radishes.  With Howard taking a packed lunch with him four days a week, we've been snipping leaves early every morning to go in salads or sandwiches.  Probably getting through the equivalent of three or four bags of salad during weekdays, let alone weekends.  Then you factor in grown in peat free (Dalefoot) growing media, raised organically, food metres rather than miles, plus being a matter of minutes from harvest to table (or a couple of hours for the packed lunches) and no single use plastic whatsoever, and it's wins all round.

The bulbs we planted in pots in the front garden one icy November day have put on a wonderful display and are now dying back until next year (bar one pot that has stuff that should flower until July), and the perennial bed we relaid in February is coming to the fore.  The wallflowers are still providing bursts of bronze & peach, but the main colour at present is purple - centaurea & trailing verbena, plus the foliage of my penstemon echoing the colour of the flowers peaking right now.  My cephelaria gigantea is romping away again, with plenty of buds, as is the clematis, once again seemingly thriving on neglect or is it just growing at a pace we can barely keep up with tying it in to keep us on our toes?

Brown Sugar - my favourite tulip