Hopefully slightly more relevant than my last post about The Crooked Car Dealer.
At long last. The first seeds of the season have been sown.
It's been a very sullen, cold and slow Spring so far. I know that some of my neighbours have taken their chances and sown their first Summer seed a couple of weeks ago already. I refrained, but we all agree on one thing: we greatly fear a repeat of last year's oddly fucked-up season. Last year Spring sprang pretty early, so we all leapt in and planted. Then it all collapsed. Through an unusually cold and damp October and November all the baby plants went dormant, and never really caught up with the growth we'd normally expect through Summer. Yields were way down, and some of the sunlight-hungry crops - Chiles particularly - barely produced any fruit at all until well into early Winter!
So this year, despite some promising weather a couple of weeks ago, I held back with my planting. But today was so Spring perfect a day - sunny, warm, and not a breath of wind - that you'ld have to be inhuman to resist.
So the first seeds are sown. First are the most essential Chiles, Tomatoes and Eggplants, plus a tray of Lettuce for seed. Let's see how the weird weather treats us. I certainly have enough to be getting on with to prepare the beds in the meantime, and I'll follow up with more seed-sowing in a week or so.
If our summer was anything to go by, you're probably in for another fucked-up year, but it wasn't as bad as last year.
ReplyDeleteThis year stayed cold later, really late, then we had a long period of sunny, dry but unseasonably cool weather. Now it's raining finally, and staying cool.
I'm sorry about the car... As you've probably noticed, I use my blog for that sort of post from time to time...
I'm deep into the changing seed law here. The debates in European parliaments have started, and we're now proposing amendments. I hope you guys are all doing well, and it's nice to see you posting again.
Hi Mike,
ReplyDeleteI finally got round to replying to your comment on our own blog today, sorry for the delay. It's amusing reading about your spring planting as we are well and truly into autumn here. I lived in Cape Town when I was 10 for a year and we spent Christmas Day on the beach, with not a snowflake in sight.
best of luck with this season's vegetable production.