And now on to planting

Only one Kumoi pear on the whole tree, May 2024

As far as seeds go, I'm on the final stretch.  Everything that needs to be sown before summer has at least one tray sown so far, even bottom-of-the-queue corn.  Why was corn last to be prioritized?  Everything else either takes up less room and/or gives a bigger harvest:  corn takes up a lot of space for very little edible return--we love it as a luxury, not a necessity.

And so now I'm on to a transplanting frenzy.  Every day for more than a week I've been taking up trays and pots to the allotment to get things in there: mainly peas (nearly done now) but also beets and I've moved on to the tomatoes too.  There is still a lot of space to plant at the allotment but because of intense slug pressure, I really can't take up a lot of things.  For instance, I tried four extra lettuce seedlings when planting them out at home;  they went into a newly filled container, with a thick layer of eggshells surrounding them and a bit of chicken wire over the top--these lasted one day.  

Because of the ongoing pot shortage, most of my warm weather crops--squash, zuc, climbing beans, corn, pickling cucumbers--got sown later than I would have liked.  Some of these aren't even sprouting yet--to think I actually transplanted most of them out in May last year.  However, they should still succeed with a later June transplant, which I sometimes have to do anyway if mid/late May is still chilly or very rainy (though it's not this year(.

The view from the back door, May 2024

At home I'm about halfway through planting my kitchen garden beds.  I do have a fairly big garden and could convert quite a bit more of it to beds--and perhaps I will do so in the future--but we like having a mixed garden with trees, ornamentals and a bit of lawn.  I have mostly brassicas here at the moment but also this weekend I transplanted some parsley and marigold seedlings, pricked out from a large pot I'd broadcast them into.  I'm also preparing a newly sheet mulched bed (mainly covered with last winter's contents of the chicken house) for salad cucumbers.

The lettuces, cauliflowers and direct sown cabbages seemed to have been badly damaged by those pesky wood pigeons so I erected a piece of insect mesh over them; while it won't completely exclude cabbage butterflies, it should keep out pigeons, ducks and chickens.  It looks like those rotten pigeons completely nipped off all the little cabbage seedlings so I transplanted out some purple sprouting broccoli instead and will later transplant some more cabbage further along that bed.  Luckily I had already broadcast another pinch of cabbage seed into a large pot (now sprouting up) just in case the direct sown ones didn't succeed.