There’s been a manure delivery! Very fresh stuff, steamy and boiling hot in the middle. That was all the incentive I needed to sort out my compost bins. After emptying, I shifted a couple of bins out of the way so any hedgerow birds could have a wormy breakfast. I’d been being closely watched by a pair of robins. They were on the ground and stuffing their faces as soon as I was 8ftish away and drinking coffee.

Years as a teenage stable slave has got me very used to shovelling manure, but the ammonia fumes from the middle still made my eyes water! I’ve found filling compost bags and tipping them from the barrow into the bins is the quickest/easiest way. If I just fill my barrow I drop too much with the fork, plus my 1970s barrow is teeny. I’ve bought yet another a 330L dalek on ebay, just down the road from me, so that might be me sorted – 4 bins for plot 100 and 2 for plot 92. Though you can never have enough compost…

My tomatoes are now mostly ensconced in the greenhouse and I hope they will be happier there. They definitely have more light. The flat’s starting to be darker now the sun doesn’t shine in directly. (Before starting to grow veg, I didn’t really appreciate quite how much the sun moves from season to season.) I’ve sown some more 100s&1000s to make up for the ones that didn’t survive my fig incident and have also stuck in some Dancing with Smurfs I found lurking in the tomato section of the seed box.

I pulled out lots more horsetail from the bottom bed. It’s really taken hold and it’s going to be hard to get rid of it. I might bareroot the fruit over winter and move it all out, and possibly put the other greenhouse down there rather than at the top of the plot so I can keep the horsetail more under control. For now the unused bit of the bed will house the onions when they are big enough to set out – it will at least make me weed often!

The card on plot 92 is more than a bit weathered. I think there are more things holding it down than actual cardboard. It needs improving. Thankfully bikes are delivered in reeeeeeeeallly big boxes and my local bike shop is happy to give them away. So I have a steady source of BIG cardboard boxes as weed suppressant/winter covers. They just need to fit in Maud. That might be the sticking point. There’s not much width in an Mx5 passenger seat…

The new bespoke nets for 2 mini-fruit cages have arrived so this weekend’s jobs are:
– get enough dahlia stakes for the purple bed, paint them and set them up
– set up netting
– get new compost bin from Epsom and fill it up
– plant out the cornflowers, marigolds and cerinthe and pot on the cosmos
– plant out or pot up the oca
– dig over where the sweetcorn will go and add BFB to it
– sow cucumbers with my god-daughter