Started sowing seeds

I pricked out the Bedfordshire Champion onions and the Webb's Wonderful lettuce.  I will do the Alisa Craig onions tomorrow. The Early Onward pea seeds were planted in those trays with little divisions.  These ones had 60 sections and I used three of them just for one packet of seed.  I am going to space the pea seedlings a little further apart on the allotment this year.  I think that I put them a little too close together usually.

I decided to plant the autumn sown sweet peas in the allotment.  I had already put up the canes for them so they were planted with a little mychorrhizal fungi and inoculated charcoal.  There was still some noticeable amounts of charcoal that I used for the onions last year lying on the surface of the soil.  I think that the frost makes stones rise to the surface and this is what happened to the charcoal.  I just collected it up and put it into the planting holes with the rest.

I got quite a few Oban Bay sweet peas to survive the winter and they made up the majority of these seedling.  Others were Anniversary, Charlie's Angels, White Supreme, Charlie's Angels and Dynasty. There were about 17 plants in all.  I watered them in with some comfrey liquid diluted with rain water.  I always seem to be taking home dirty pots and trays so this time I decided to wash them all in the water butt by the tap.  The water is not on yet but some people are planting and they have asked for it to be put on again.

I took the dead brassicae off the top bed and put them in plastic bags to bring home.  Then I thought that I might well put these at the bottom of the trench in the new allotment.  So I left them on one of the compost heaps.  The compost on this bed is a little rougher than the compost I put onto the onion bed.  I had not reached the bakers tray sieve in my excavations of the mega compost heap so none of this compost was sieved .  It needed digging in and now that the Brussel sprouts and the purple sprouting broccoli had been taken off there was a great deal more room for digging.  I dug and forked all the bed and then raked it to get rid of any stone.  There was some glass in the compost.  I just cannot get away from the stuff.

I have only once got seriously cut by broken glass on the allotment.  I got a glass splinter stuck down the side of my thumb nail.   I got it out but it could have been a lot more dangerous.  My allotment is regularly covered in cow and horse manure which contains a great number of potentially very dangerous bacteria like tetanus.  I do not want that injected into my thumb.  This is why I always take any glass shards, no matter how big they are, off the allotment.

 More sweet pea canes were put up before I came home.  The digging has taken its toll and I am very tired now.