Plot progress

The potato bed was at last dry enough for me to risk sowing the seeds, yesterday. There was room in the bed for most of my tomato plants, too:

This area was previously two separate beds, but we combined them into one last year, to save Mike some of the effort of keeping the grass strimmed in the summer. We added the autumn-made chicken manure to this bed at the end of the season last year, so the potatoes and tomatoes should find plenty of richness in this soil.

I also sowed carrots, peas and greens in one of the other beds in this area. I don't expect the peas to work - they nearly always get eaten by rodents before they germinate, but hope has triumphed over experience again. One of our neighbours has given us a load of tomato cages, which I hope will work as pea supports. They're too small, in my opinion, to function well as supports for tomatoes - I prefer to stake those, as you can see in the photo.

In the orchard, the fruit trees are flowering at a more sensible time of year than they did in 2010 - two weeks earlier than this.

And up in the woods, the ash trees' leaves are bursting into growth. Everything is looking super-lush as a result of all the rain we've had this Spring.