The tenacity of life

Whoops – uploaded my pictures and then evidently wandered off without adding any words to this.

So, Sunday I decided to pop along to the lottie to potter a little, and was getting my tools ready when I found this little chap in with my tools.

It’s Eric, the Half-A-Potato. When harvesting last year, because of the clay soil I ended up bisecting a lot of potatoes or spearing them (depending on whether I used spade or fork. This is one reason why potatoes irritate me a lot. Most of the damaged ones got thrown away as they are very dirty after being cut, but this chap sat in the garage, and then about 6 weeks ago judging by the sprout height decided to have a go at being a potato plant. Such tenacity for life must be admired, so I took him to the plot and planted him in the corner of the potato plot. Probably foolish sentiment to plant a damaged non-seed potato, but hey.

While I was there I gave the broad beans some support. These chaps successfully overwintered, although with the non-winter we are having that’s not really much of an achievement. Now they have to over-damp-soggy-windy-bit and see how they cope with that. Being strung up will hopefully help.

There are a few gaps but I have quite a few beans left to plant for a spring sowing… I may just fill in the gaps and keep the extras for aminopyralid testing etc.

I decided to pull up the last of the brassicas. This is early to be calling it a day for brassicas but because we only had two dodgy cabbages, one of which had a nasty heart anyway, and five brussel sprouts that are a bit of a mission to process so better to do in larger batches, I thought I’d pull them up now. Easier said than done of course, on the theme of the tenacity of life. I had a small pair of secateurs and a bent hand fork (I’d brought the bent one as by experience I knew these could prove some challenge). Some ladies stopped to tell me I was using too small a fork. Yes, I know. I still won in the end. Eventually.

That’s 484g brussels from 5 plants. The original nine plants were 33.3p each. One turned out to be a cabbage, which we ate. Two I pulled because of over crowding. One I pulled up for psuedo-Christmas day. Dad harvested Christmas Day’s portion (prob around 150g?) from the remaining five plants, leaving 484g of peeled and trimmed. So ignoring the few Dad pulled off, that’s 484g for £1.67, or £3.45/kg. Which is more expensive than frozen or unpeeled sprouts, but less expensive than peeled or baby sprouts. So reasonably economical, fresher, and Mum likes them = should probably grow them again. But maybe not 8 plants this time. They’re supposed to be hard to grow – I just shoved them in (overcrowded as well), didn’t stake them or anything. They even managed with those two storms we had recently. They were sheltered slightly by the compost bin (the lid of which did blow onto a neighbour’s plot) and probably supported a tad by close planting. Wonder if this year will work as well?

Oh I also went to the local garden centre on Sunday, picked up about £24 worth of seeds, got to the till to find they were all half price! Utterly exciting 😀