Starting off the new season

At the weekend the whole family went up to the allotment for a bit of sheet mulching, the first visit there since the end of December.  Not much had changed, other than the garlic sprouts being marginally taller.  We had to track down a couple of composter lids which had blown away (one near, one a bit far) and get the roof back on the chicken house--luckily all chickens are safe at home though their roof here needed a quick fix recently too.  I brought home three leeks;  there are about three still growing, my total for this season.  

Also at the weekend I got down my boxes of seeds and went through all the packets, throwing out some very old seed and organizing the rest by which month I will sow it:  I have little dividers marked Jan-June.  I also threshed the few dried bean pods I'd saved in the summer for seed--when I have a lot of bean or pea pods I put them in a cloth bag and whack it with a stick like a pinata, but there were only a few dozen so I just broke them open by hand;  I'll look forward to sowing these in April.

I have several packets of seed to sow indoors this month: tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, chilis, eggplant; and broad beans outdoors.  In the past I usually pre-sprout the broad beans in a small plastic bag of damp compost in my garage;  once most of them have a little white root sprout, I sow them in the ground.  While pre-sprouting is more successful than just direct sowing them straight from the packet, it's still hit and miss--mice/birds/slugs/whatever seem to get a lot of them anyway.  I'm going to individually sow them in pots and toilet paper tubes this year using my waste wool method in the hopes I have better success.  It's more work to have to transplant 150-ish starts but if that means I get 150 plants, that's worth it.

We gave the chicken tractor a quick tune up (it needed a little bit of waterproofing material on the roof ridge), and after more chicken wrangling than seemed strictly necessary, it's up and running.  My veg patch at home needs some serious scratching and pecking, so half of the flock is hard at work while the other half (the newest rescues) are looking on longingly from their yard--it really only fits four chickens at most.  I still don't know which is preferable to a chicken:  the very small tractor which gets fresh ground every day, or the much larger yard which gets muddier every day (though we also raked in a pile of garden debris at the weekend so it's not quite as muddy now).  In one they have enough space to walk about five paces one way and three the other, but like I mentioned it has fresh plants/grass/weeds/bugs every day;  the other they can run laps and flap up to different levels if they like, but it's a mudbath this time of year.