Five a day vegetable seeds

Yesterday, I sowed some vegetable seeds for the first time since 2007!

The topsoil has been shovelled into the new raised beds, a joint effort by MTM and myself though I have to say, he did do more than I. I gave it a week to settle down. Really it should have some organic matter like compost or well rotted stable manure dug in, however the time for that is Autumn through Winter.

But I'm in a hurry, I want to grow something now! It's already too late this year me to grow crops that need a long growing season like onions, parsnips and leeks. So, to increase fertility I'm relying on chemicals, albeit organic ones, a dressing of dried fish, blood and bone has been hoed into the surface and then fast maturing root crops seeds have been planted into shallow pre-watered drills, yesterday it was carrots, beetroot, radishes, turnips and kohlrabi.

Today, I'm doing peas, and three varieties of lettuce, I like to start these off in pots and then plant them out to grow on. I'm also sowing coriander micro leaves; I've only grown conventional coriander before so am interested to see how that works out.

Mustn't hang around, like I said I'm in a hurry!

Vegetable gardening begins ... almost!

The top soil arrived for my vegetable garden today! Here it is being delivered by Len Kirk in big heaps over the low fence into the back garden.

All we've got to do now is shovel it into the newly built raised beds.

It's MTM's birthday tomorrow, I'm sure he'd like nothing better than to spend it dealing with his piles (of soil that is)!

(Click on any picture to get a closer view of MTM's piles).

I used to play tennis

The Scheepjes crochet-a-long is progressing well. We're up to week 4, I'm crocheting the latest motifs during my break for lunch and I've realised the colours are VERY Wimbledon! I wonder if that was by design or a happy coincidence. 

I'm going back to "work" in a minute but as I'm self-employed, I can choose what I do when. It's too hot for bead making so I'm indoors cleaning yesterday's beads while waiting for Heather Watson to come onto court no. 1 on the telly. The advantage of living in a stone house is the thick walls keep the interior nice and cool.

The tennis racket you see in the picture is one of three that my sisters and I used to play with out on the street when we were kids, so it's very old! I collected it from mum and dad's house when we were there for Father's Day, mum was going to chuck them out. I decided to save one of them for the happy memories it holds. Mum says she can remember me running back from school to watch Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg (swoon, yes of course I had a massive crush!) and Virginia Wade.

#scheepjeswol #scheepjes2015CAL