Cloudy early morning which soon turned to warm sun. I cycled up to the plot as the main road would be closed for the whole weekend meaning all roads would be clogged with cars. I was right, it took Tom nearly two hours to drive a couple of miles from work.

I prepped and sowed two rows of carrots, these will join the one row I did in the garden. Checking the row of parsnip seed I sowed last week, no parsnips just yet (I wouldn’t expect there to be) but the radish markers had started to show.

The onions were pretty weedy and so I uncovered them while I did a quick weed. The overwintered ones have started to get big, their shoots at least. All sets planted the other week have all taken. I had lost quite a lot of the overwintered ones which makes me wonder if I should bother with them this year or just plant them all out in the spring time. It will also be interesting to see if the netting has/will stop the allium leaf minor.

My main task would be to prep the bed for squashes and courgettes. Before I did this I had to pull the remaining leeks that were still there. In the end, these did grow and while they did initially suffer from allium leaf minor they seemed to covered over the winter to grow to some decent sizes. Pulling them all, I will cut them up and freeze most of them. Still not the massive “main crop” harvest we used to have, but then we didn’t grow as many this year due to last year’s “non harvest”.

Having pulled all the leeks I dug out the top layer of soil and replaced it with manure, piling the dug out soil on top. At home, I sowed the various courgette, pumpkin and cucumber seeds.

I came home with:

• rhubarb (made rhubarb and custard bread and butter pudding)
• purple sprouting
• leeks