Winter into spring

The winter showed signs of being over this weekend and so Al and I set about getting our first and second early potatoes into the ground. I had turned over the ground that they were to go into last autumn and the snow, ice and rain had done a decent job of breaking down the large clods of earth into a reasonably fine soil. This made the job of making five shallow trenches for 10 tubers each relatively easy.

We put in Kestrel as our second early and Casablanca as the first early. I wanted Lady Christl in place of the latter but there were none left when I placed the order at the beginning of March. I am not expecting too much from them. The ground is stony, and worse, the seed company sent me twice the order in compensation for running out of my first choice. My guess is that if they were prepared to do that, they may not be a first rate potato.

Our morning down on the plot was rather lovely. The weather was mild, the sun was out and we finished work in good time to go out for lunch somewhere nice. Of course, the winter had been dreadful, as it had been for everyone else, and this made a nice day seem even nicer.

We did have the occasional reasonable day in March and we had been able to put in 12 canes of raspberry Glen Ample (albeit in a gentle snow shower), in early March and 10 runners of strawberry Cambridge Favourite at the end of the month. In addition to that we managed to put in onions and shallots a couple of weeks ago. We bought sets of Red Cross, Autumn Gold and Jermor to join the garlic (Bella Italia, Provence Wight) and over-wintered onions (Troy, Red Cross) and shallots (Biztro and Grise). The latter look OK but the onions look a little sorry for themselves - they have had a hard time of course.