![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yet another lovely spring day.
Mar. 17th, 2012 11:17 amIt did rain during the night, so I haven't suddenly moved to the continent. Spice, the autumnal-coloured rescue cat, has hurt her leg, having been bitten by probably another cat. She's on antibiotics. It remains to be seen how easy it is to put pills down her throat. Hatter's a champion - if you can get them onto the back of his tongue, you're done. Just as well, really.
I'm eating a really, really nice burger from the local coffee shop, after some gardening. I've put wood ash on the brassica bed, to ward off club root, and nematodes *everywhere* to kill slugs (they can come back in the summer, but right now I have too many tender delicious things sprouting). I've also sown some leaf beet, also known as perpetual spinach. I'll sow lots of other things later, when I have more energy and less hunger. The 120 litres of compost I had the day before yesterday is already down to about 40 litres. Most seeds get dumped on top of a few handfuls of compost to make an improvised miniature 'bed' on top of the real bed.
If you cut dandelions off at soil level and spread the leaves out to die on the soil, slugs will apparently go for the wilting leaves first in preference to your living plants. They also dump a lot of nutrients into your soil from right down where the tap root goes to, making them available to shallow-rooted plants. Suddenly, these pernicious and ever-spreading weeds have become green mulches and quite valuable. I'm glad, as they're a massive pain to try to get rid of. Now I can just cut them off with scissors and make sure they don't overgrow the cultivated stuff. (You can eat the leaves too, but personally I think they taste foul).
It remains to be seen whether, after all the companion planting and green mulches and 'working with nature', I actually end up with any vegetables outside at all.
I'm eating a really, really nice burger from the local coffee shop, after some gardening. I've put wood ash on the brassica bed, to ward off club root, and nematodes *everywhere* to kill slugs (they can come back in the summer, but right now I have too many tender delicious things sprouting). I've also sown some leaf beet, also known as perpetual spinach. I'll sow lots of other things later, when I have more energy and less hunger. The 120 litres of compost I had the day before yesterday is already down to about 40 litres. Most seeds get dumped on top of a few handfuls of compost to make an improvised miniature 'bed' on top of the real bed.
If you cut dandelions off at soil level and spread the leaves out to die on the soil, slugs will apparently go for the wilting leaves first in preference to your living plants. They also dump a lot of nutrients into your soil from right down where the tap root goes to, making them available to shallow-rooted plants. Suddenly, these pernicious and ever-spreading weeds have become green mulches and quite valuable. I'm glad, as they're a massive pain to try to get rid of. Now I can just cut them off with scissors and make sure they don't overgrow the cultivated stuff. (You can eat the leaves too, but personally I think they taste foul).
It remains to be seen whether, after all the companion planting and green mulches and 'working with nature', I actually end up with any vegetables outside at all.
