April feels like a long time ago! I had a fortnight off, during which it was mostly far too cold to be gardening. Still, some things got done... Sowing and growing At the start of April, things were looking good in the greenhouse. The beans and peas were shooting up, and other things weren't too far behind. Then we hit a cold snap, and the plastic I'd draped over the seedlings overnight wasn't enough, and I lost quite a few bean plants to the frost. Most disappointing, but it did give me a good opportunity to see just how much the seeds swell as the plant emerges. I bought a greenhouse thermometer, and some fleece, and started covering up all the plants every night. I was never a big fan of mollycoddling plants, but this does seem to have done the trick, and I've not lost anything else since. I was surprised by the variation in temperature throughout the day - I've never had a greenhouse thermometer before, and started to wish I'd gone for a fancier one with an app. Still, this one confirmed that it never got below freezing under the fleece, and everything has stayed nice and cosy since (for the seedlings, at least). By the end of the month, things were starting to outgrow their pots. I'm most excited about my loofah plants, which germinated in April and so far haven't died. No idea whether I'll actually get loofahs from them, but I'm going to do my best! Harvest April saw the final harvest from last year - a whole load of kale and the last few leeks. The leeks were cooked and eaten within a few days. We had some dried kale, but most of it has gone into the freezer. Garden preparation Pulling up the last of the kale and leeks left room to spread some more mulch. Some of this was compost, and some was dug out of the chicken run. While they were shut in under bird flu restrictions over the winter, we put woodchip down on the floor of the run, and much of it had broken down into a nice brown crumbly compost, which I dug out and they helped me spread on the veg beds. I also raked up a load of old hay from the meadow and spread it around the fruit trees and edible windbreak. A bit of it went under the swing seat too, because, having been released from chicken lockdown at the start of April, our older chickens like nothing more than just sitting around in the sunshine. Fixing walls While I was in the edible windbreak, I made a start on fixing the dry stone wall that the cows knocked over last year. When it happened, we just shoved an old gate behind it to stop the cows getting in, but with the new cows due here shortly, it was about time I fixed it. I don't find it easy fixing these gaps. By the time you've stripped out the bits that look too precarious to build on, you often find the gap is far bigger than it initially looked, and it can be quite overwhelming. Still, I decided I wasn't going to be too perfectionist about it, and having seen one of our older farming neighbours 'throwing up' a wall in another field recently, I tried not to think too hard, and concentrate on just getting it back up. I thought I was making reasonable progress... but then on my birthday, as we were driving off for breakfast in a cafe, the same farmer turned up with his brother, with the intention of rebuilding the wall for me. If it hadn't been my birthday, I might have stopped to help... but they insisted we went out, and we came back to a fully functional wall. I'm a mixture of both very grateful, and rather embarrassed. Grateful, because it took them a couple of hours, and would have taken me weeks. And embarrassed because, well, I really should have done it myself, and it looks like they had to undo my initial attempts anyway. Oh dear. Trees! Anyway, on to something more cheerful - our trees have started to sprout! None of them are out of the top of the tubes yet, but it's still pretty exciting peering down and trying to identify what each tree is. DIY Hmm, the less said about this, the better, I think. I've got up another couple of ceiling panels, but it's still not finished. Overall April had lots of weather, and we made our first forays into visiting people again, so not a whole lot got done. We both had our first vaccines which was exciting, and in between the snow showers, we spent a lot of time sitting outside and enjoying the spring flowers. I won't speculate about May, given that we're three weeks in so I already know what's happened in most of it (a whole lot more weather, largely). Very much looking forward to summer though.
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Hello!Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm Jenni, and I write here about our new foray into country living, which includes growing food, knitting, baking, wandering around the fields, and seeing which local cafe serves the best cake. Categories
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