Lockdown Pottering. Day...no idea

A very late start today.

I wasn't nocmigging last night, but our routine has been unsettled, especially our sleep patterns. Sue has been more unsettled by the whole Covid-19 thing than I and it is not unusual for her to get up in the middle of the night.
Last night she let the dogs out and Arthur disappeared. This eventually resulted in myself being rudely woken up at 3 in the morning to help in the search. Of course Arthur wasn't at all concerned by his absence and was found in the vegetable garden up to goodness knows what.

First job of the day was to plant the final bed of potatoes. Pink Fir Apple potatoes are the latest of lates. In a blight year we often get little to no harvest, but they are worth it for the good years when they produce sacks full of delicious nobbly pink tubers which store well into the winter.

Next up were the poached egg plants. I had raised a tray of these as companion plants to my broad beans. I sow this combination every year and have only once had a very mild attack of blackfly on the beans. Whether it's down to the poached egg plants or not I don't know, but they look pretty anyway and are great for the bees.

Calabrese seedlings. Brassicas like to be planted firmly and it is 

good to plant them up to the first true leaves, so the first few centimetres of

stem that you can see get buried.

Final planting for the day was my first batch of calabrese seedlings. Calabrese is what people often call broccoli. I use the word calabrese not to be pretentious, but to avoid confusion with purple sprouting broccoli.







Unlike most of the brassicas, calabrese is a relatively quick crop so I grow several sowings to give a longer harvest period. This year I am growing spinach in with the calabrese. I am hoping that the calabrese grows quickly enough to afford the spinach plants a little shade to discourage them from bolting too quickly.













While I was in the garden I discovered that the female turkeys have taken a liking to comfrey leaves. This is not surprising really, as turkeys are also the only livestock on the farm which are happy to eat nettle leaves and keep them down. The comfrey is well capable of outgrowing a couple of turkeys pecking at it and will be very nutritious for them. The main comfrey bed has come up well this year and I will soon be taking my first harvest of leaves for plant feed.

And now for a gratuitous picture of Sue and the dogs.

Personal Protective Equipment

against a chill night time breeze

Tuesday was capped off with an hour of nocmigging between midnight and 1 a.m.
I wrapped up warm and settled down wrapped in a blanket as the night air was chilly. The moon hadn't risen yet so the stars were even more spectacular than they have been all week. It was a quiet night for birds though, with just the local mallards flying around and a couple of woodpigeons singing (yes, they sing during the night).
That was until 1 o'clock when a very clear shriek pierced the air followed by another. I had been swotting up on the calls of potential night fliers and instantly recognised this as the unlikely call of a Little Grebe passing right over my head.
This is the eighth new bird that I have registered for the smallholding in as many nights sat listening. It's astonishing how the birds that fly over during the night are such a different set to those that I regularly see during the day.