Planting out

With it so sunny and warm this afternoon when I got home, I got on with a bit more planting out.

For some reason I have spatial awareness issues when I try to convert plants in the greenhouse to the garden.

I always have so many seedlings, too many in fact. I think it must be to do with the tiny seedling trays all crammed in together, but not looking big and green and foliage-y, yet when I start to plant them out in the garden, trying to maintain some sort of spacing between them I usually find I have a half dozen too many seedlings for each row.

Not that they go to waste, I just add another row or extend the row, and end up not having rows of onions but just planting them in between rows randomly - they are one of the few things that both hubby and teen can identify so I don't have to mark them out - everything else has to be in rows otherwise it comes under the mental banner of weeds for my garden helpers.

I am still cross about my gooseberries - they vanished under the lawnmower as wielded by my other half last year - "well they had thorns I thought they were a bramble and needed to be cut down!"

I still have another tray of cabbages, calabrese and purple sprouting broccoli to go out, but have overrun my designated rows on cabbages, caulis and broccolis already.

Spring has been so slow coming this year, it feels really late to be still planting out, but frost risk has only just gone, and the freak snow the other week would have killed everything if it had not been in the greenhouse still. The deluge that we had at the beginning of May has not done my beans any favours, I suspect they have rotten in the soil, and I need to reseed the french, broad and runner bean canes, as well as a row of gherkins, again I suspect the sheer volume of rain that fell has just rotten the seeds away.

Our quince is finally in flower, as is another of my apple trees with plentiful pollinators buzzing around the garden now, our strawberries are merrily flowering away with the first little green heads appearing, and we even have a couple of swallows back.

Even though the garden still looks a little spartan, we managed to have a 'garden' dinner tonight.

Last year's harvest of potatoes and onions is down to its last couple of buckets and one hanging basket, but I scraped together a plate of chips, an omlette from our chicken eggs (those that Edith isn't trying to sit on - at last count she had a dozen under her!) with some onions and some parsley already growing well, accompanied by a salad of the first few leaves from the bavaria lettuces, some of the red weed, some pea shoots, chives and raddishes.