Sowin' in the rain

Pak choi seedlings

The sowing season has begun in earnest. While it's pouring outside, I've been sowing crystal lemon cucumbers, melons, achochas, tomatillos (purple, green and yellow), okra (good luck needed here), lettuces, mangetout, fennel, coriander and a lot of modules of brassica (Romanesco and 'normal' cauliflower, red, white and Savoy cabbage, kale, calabrese, broccoli, Brussels sprouts). Just the celeriac left to do - everything else will either be sown direct (carrots, parsnips, chard, rapini, herbs, rocket) or in early May (courgettes, squashes, pumpkins, beans, sweetcorn).

The conservatory is filling up

It's very satisfying to sow all the things we'll be eating in the coming year. Everything I sow is potentially on the menu, but we never know which veg are going to have a good year in advance. Anything I forget to sow will be off the menu.

I've been trying to be a bit disciplined and use up the older seed packets so that I can start with fresh seeds next year. Quite hard when the brassica packets contain hundreds of seeds and we really only want a dozen or so plants of each.

Oca

Another new item on the veg menu, hopefully, will be oca, another one of these versatile South American tubers and very pretty to boot. I've been given some by a local gardener who's had great success with them. I'm planning to treat them like maincrop potatoes and sow them in late April, direct into a trench. At the moment they are sitting in an egg carton under an attic window, just like the maincrop potatoes, and awaiting their turn. We've tried a few raw in salads, where they add a nice bit of crunch, and boiled in a stew - should be a good addition to the winter vegetables.

Just a tad wet out there

Despite the rainy, windy weather we've managed to plant 400 sets of onions and the first earlies on the one lovely, sunny day we've had this week. And they got nicely watered in the next day, without any effort on our behalf.

Note the size of the burn

We've also managed to plant another 240 hedge plants. Now the bottom paddock is partitioned into usable and protected chunks of ground, and hedged all the way around. It's always a lottery when you're ordering bareroot plants what the weather will be like when they get delivered. As they really need to go into the ground as soon as possible you haven't got much choice but to plant them no matter what the weather. True to form (this is our third year of hedge planting), we had one day of nasty planting conditions, with a cold, cold wind, but the other two days were pleasant at least.

New cotoneaster hedge

We're reaching the end of a lot of vegetables now - the last of the celeriacs were mashed yesterday, the last of the leeks will be had today, the kale is starting to put out flowers and I took the Brussels sprout leaves off before taking out the remaining plants (the sprouts were no good unfortunately). One last winter lettuce remains in the greenhouse. But there are also some new things on the menu: rhubarb, spring cabbage, wild rocket.

Soruss is getting a bit cocky now that spring is under way. Unfortunately, he is just as guest-unfriendly as his dad. So far he's tried to attack almost every guest and had a couple of satisfying attacks when my cousin and her 10-year-old daughter stumbled while fighting him. One of his tricks is to fly up behind people, aiming for the backs of their knees. But at least he's very content in his territory and safely contained within it. The general safety advice is: Take a stick when traversing his territory and keep an eye on him, even after you've walked past him, and you'll be fine.

Cheerful daffodil on a rainy day