Full Metal Wheelbarrow

Yesterday poor postie had to bring us ALL the parcels :) There were two packages of plug plants - six yellow Osteospermums and five blue Sennetti. They've been potted up and are hopefully now wiggling their toesies in the nice fresh compost and comtemplating growing big and strong.

Also a new satnav as it was on special at Amazon and has some snazzy new features that the old one doesn't - like telling me which lane to be in when there's a choice, for instance. This one is also to be fitted with Brian Blessed's voice - not just as a gimmick, I can actually hear him more clearly than "Jane" and besides, I find him oddly reassuring. Yes, I'm weird, but you knew that anyway :)

Today I managed to get some time on the allotment between rain showers and among other things opened up my compost heap which has been maturing for over a year now. The following pictures will be of limited interest to those of a non-gardening persuasion and possibly even to those who do like to garden :)

( Compost and more flying things. )

 The time of year has come to sow many seeds for the allotment, so this morning I hied me to B&Q for the purpose of buying potting compost.

Last time I bought some, I switched to a different brand, which I've found quite a lot better than the stuff I was using before. So of course, when I went to buy some more today, B&Q have changed the entire range and no longer stock it. Sigh.

Hopefully the stuff I bought instead will be as good. We'll see.

I bought a new bag of potting compost today (do try to contain your excitement at the back there.).

I've been using B&Q's own brand peat-free compost and while I wouldn't blame it for my poor germination results this year, I've been rather dissatisfied with it generally - it tends to have a lot of big lumps of bark in it, which are no use to man or beast and can hurt when accidentally grabbed in a handful of compost. The last bag of it seemed rather dry, too.

So this time I got a different brand - Westland - which is slightly more expensive, but looks like much nicer stuff - lighter and fluffier, more moist and with fewer lumps. So I used that today to pot on my summer-sown brassicas. Those have been quite a bit more successful than the spring sown ones - I potted up thirteen borecole seedlings and ten cabbage Tundra.

Also potted on were my two artichoke seedlings which I'm growing on as replacements - several of the established plants suffered badly last winter and I'm not sure how long I can expect them to last for in any case, so replacing them a couple a year seems like a good plan.

The winter pansies are starting to germinate too, so I hope there'll be lots of those to brighten up the garden in the autumn.

Today I had to buy a set of yarn needles to sew up my cardigan, because I still can't find my needlecase.

On the up side they were only 60p and I found a little wool shop in the craft centre in the village that I hadn't known about before.

We have a new wormery.  The old one is just a big tub with a tap on it, and quite hard to get the compost out of - this one is a set of trays so it should be much easier. We put it together this evening and I shall start moving the worms into their new "Des Res" tomorrow. I hope they'll like it :-)

In defiance of cold germs and possibly of common sense, Rob and I have started 2008 off by trundling down to the allotment and turning the compost heap.

Considering that we didn't start filling it until the end of September I was pleasantly surprised at how well the heap had composted. There were four or five good barrowloads of usable compost already and it was good stuff - like really nice friable soil.

We've put the uncomposted stuff back in layered with some of the soil and spread the rest of the compost on one of my newly dug beds, which I've now earmarked for peas, since they like a well-fertilised soil.

There seems to be a mousie living in the heap too. Sadly he seems to have a dodgy back leg - not sure if one of us accidentally whacked him while we were digging the heap out, or if that's why he's hiding in the heap in the first place. As long as he doesn't eat all my compost worms he's welcome though. I should probably call him Basil...

The birds have discovered the fat balls I hung in the tree for them though they haven't made huge inroads into them yet - presumably there's plenty of other food about since the winter's been fairly mild.

I think the fresh air and exercise probably did me good. I just wish this rotten cough would bugger off back to wherever it came from and leave me alone.