May Madness
Frantic seed sowing, mouse catching and at long last sunshine!
May is one of the best months for gardening with the first of the salads and hot radishes ready to eat plus the seedlings are nearly all out of the house and in the polytunnel, it is lovely being able to eat at the kitchen table again! Now with the recent sunshine we have even eaten a few meals in the garden, a total joy that was something as I child I totally hated to do, I used to cry because of the bugs.
The garden has really come on well this spring, I mean because it is in its 3rd year and now any of the perennial herbs and veg have settled in. The weather seems to always be a bit of a chore and this spring has been especially cool which means everything has been very slow to grow. It is warming up now but the nights are still not reaching the temperatures we would really like and for some reason the polytunnel is reading overnights of between 2-6*c which isn’t ideal. I have been a bit braver than normal and planted out seedlings earlier that I have done previously, covered everything in fleece for an little protection and extra warmth. The aim was to have an early harvest but it seems (probably because I got fed up of the fleece and gave up) that things are just growing slowly. Next year I have to keep the fleece on!!
I have been mentally prepared for slugs, snails, caterpillars and pigeons but I haven’t experienced mice before so it was quite a shock when I took all my freshly sown seed trays of peas, beans, courgettes, squash, cucumber even beetroot to the polytunnel to find that they had all been dug up and eaten. The mice had an absolute feast. They even shelled the sunflowers to get to the yummy middles, leaving the outers strewn around the floor. I quickly invested in some traps and have now a sad little mouse graveyard. Generally I like to work with the nature in the garden, but their seed preference is a little expensive and needs must.
The bank holiday weekend at the end of the month sees the Hay Festival and How The Light Gets In happening in Hay-on-Wye. We are super duper busy at the restaurant so nothing except a quick early morning water and rapid harvest is happening till the 5th June when we break for a week off. By then I should have fava beans, first early potatoes (grown in the polytunnel) and turnips ready for the new menu and lots and lots of seedlings to go out into the beds…. that sounds like a week off, right?