May Day bank holiday planting between the showers.

Potato planting time again, the Cara main crop have been 'chitting' for a while now and have short stubby green shoots, perfect for planting. 
If they had long thin white shoots, it means they were chitted in too dark a place, so I'd rub them off and start again. 
Best in an unheated greenhouse or on a windowsill out of the sun.

So I dug each trench about 8"-10" deep, 30" apart. 
Then put manure in the bottom of the trench & some potato fertiliser on the soil that's to be drawn back over the seed potatoes. Each spud is 15" apart, so they have plenty of space to grow. 
I put in 40 potatoes into 5 trenches, will put more in soon for a staggered harvest.

We did some weeding around the Broad Beans and put some support canes in, now they are growing taller, we don't want any to be snapped off if windy!

Finished these new raised beds, by adding some well rotted manure, covering with weed suppressant fabric and planting the Gooseberry's through. 
I will cover them with woodchips when we have some. 

This border that was cleared while I put the trellis up last week has been planted up with: Clematis, Jasmine, Teasels, Oxeye Daises, Feverfew, Sweet Rocket, Echinops and for ground cover Sweet Woodruff.

While it was raining this morning, I started off two lots of Cucumber in toilet roll tubes, Pepinex & Femspot, both F1 types, so should do well. 
You may notice the tubes are short, its because the seeds only need to be 1/2" deep, then when ready the whole lot can be planted so as to not disturb the roots.  I put them in a heated propagator as they need heat to get started, at least 21c.

Only crop harvested today was Rhubarb, we got some yesterday too, so added the weights together, 3lb so far. 

We had a rhubarb crumble from the first lot and it was lovely with vanilla ice cream.

So as the title says 'planting between the showers' well the sun came out around lunch time, so we did manage all that planting in 4 hours. 

Glad I got the potatoes in as they need plenty of time to grow, ready for harvest time about Sept/Oct.

Exciting news, we saw 6 baby Frogs in the pond, so now we have more pond life to observe.

Thanks for reading/returning. Ian