Forecast for rain but when I woke up it was blue sky and sunny. I wasn’t planning anything this weekend as the weather was meant to be bad but I got up and went out early in the morning to plant out onion sets and to prep the beds for planting potatoes in the coming weeks. This would be my first dawn visit for ages, something I used to do a lot in order to avoid meeting too many people. I don’t mind such things but quite often it’s nice to be on the plot by yourself before everyone else arrives, which seems to be around 10am. I got there today just before 7am and I was the only person about.

Over wintered onion sets are starting to pick up allowing me to spot gaps where onions did not make it through the winter. I filled these gaps with new sets. No immediately obvious new damage from allium leaf miner and the leeks from last year which got very much damaged are now re-growing and starting to look quite reasonable. I’ll keep the netting on the onions until the risk has past for the year.

With Easter coming up, I plan to plant out potatoes quite soon and this will be in the bed there, during the winter, I put down a layer of manure and covered it over. It’s been left ever since and this morning I hoed and raked it just to break bits up and to level it off. This is now all ready for planting.

Before returning home, I picked:

• rhubarb
• purple sprouting

I got home just before 9am, just in time for coffee and breakfast