Preparing for planting

Saturday morning dawned with lovely clear blue skies - not even a puff of wind around - so we thought we'd better get on with rotovating the last of the vegetable beds.  There were only 3 to be done, everything else is planted up with habas, peas, garlic, onions and strawberries, but these had been left empty since the end of last year so were a bit weedy.  3 beds doesn't sound like much work but the smallest one was 3m by 1m and the largest a sort of triangular area  6m long and between 1m and 3m at the widest point.

what will be the triangular bed

However, the rotovator makes light work of it all.  I'm sure John doesn't think that, it has 2 settings either hare or tortoise and I had a go when we first bought it - on hare setting I felt  as though it was in control rather than me and on tortoise setting it was just so heavy that I couldn't manoeuvre it.  But it's a lot quicker and less back-breaking than digging compacted soil by hand - even though he could hardly  move on Sunday morning.

After he'd turned over the soil once, I tipped on the remaining goat manure and he went back again digging that in before  I tidied up the bed ready for planting.  We were done before lunch so decided to make a start on a totally new terrace as we have so many vegetable, herb and salad crops to plant that the existing space is not going to be enough.

the new terrace half strimmed + half dug

This area though was knee-high in greenery, mostly clover which I think is good for the ground.  So first J strimmed it all down and then rotovated the chopped-up greenery into the soil.  And what wonderful soil it is!   Rich and soft and moist - it's not been planted up with anything since we've lived here, so we should get some really good vegetables growing.   It's a terrace that we look at from our lounge and although it belongs to our neighbours   a) they're not here,   b) when they do come they don't have time to grow anything and  c) it's nearer our house than theirs so feels more like it should be ours.  That's not to say that we didn't ask, of course we did and Miguel says we can use any of their land that we need.

We have  made 1m wide beds there - the width of the rotovator - and  done 2 beds totalling about 40 metres.

As things were going so well, John decided to get the next area strimmed ready for rotovating although we didn't think we'd have time to finish that afternoon.  As it happened some friends out for a walk stopped by to see what we were up to so that was a good time to down tools and have a well-earned beer.

4pm and ready for planting.

Sunday morning was another day of clear blue skies, unfortunately John was very stiff and so we thought more  rotovating much just finish him off completely so we're leaving that till next weekend. 

You can probably guess where I'm going to be spending most of this week....