Perennially Racing Time

After last Tuesday's deluge, we had one months rainfall in about 12 hours, the plots were remarkably workable all things considered.
Saturday saw me on the Bracknell plot primarily progressing raised bed 3 with the aim of being able to progress raised bed 2; they're the far left and middle beds respectively from previous posts. I cleared through all the spits I'd previously moved, and then cleared a load more off the rubber matting on bed 2. The fact that 30% of it was still frozen didn't particularly help matters. With a section of bed 2 now accessible I started digging working away from the top section currently in use by the remainder of last years late cabbages, now running to spring greens. I managed a couple of feet before the action of my own feet on the wet clay put a stop to digging.
A phone call from my wife at this point also gave me reason to stop. Prior to making my way to the plot I'd responded to an offer on freecycle of home made compost; it's all very well encouraging people to recycle and compost providing they can use it. In this lady's case she wasn't much of a gardener and after 2 and a half years here compost bins were completely full. Anyway the upshot of the phone call was that the compost was available, all I had to do was to go and get it. So bags and spade duly in hand, that's what I did.
The standard problem with emptying compost bins, if you don't have an empty bin to transfer the top half of the bin you want to empty into, is that you can excavate about 25% of the compost from the bottom of the bin before the whole lot drops into the hole you've just created, curtailing excavations. Having created some space in bin 1, I was able to move about 25% of the contents of bin 2 into bin one, enabling me to excavate more from bin 2 before it's contents gave way. Total extracted, about 180 litres of compost. It wasn't bad, the usual odd flower pot, plastic bag, avacardo skin and stone, broken piece of stick etc. Future extractions, yes I've signed my self up to empty the bins once or twice a year, should be better, benefiting from the action of the poo from her chickens and absence of eggshells, the latter of which are now crushed and fed back to the chickens.
One thing emptying the bins did show up was the need for me to fix the tire on the wheel barrow. It's a job I've been meaning to do for a while having become completely exasperated by continually having to pump it up. I'd acquired another tire on a wheel of a different design some months ago off another knackered barrow which had suffered the fate of most barrows, it had lost its bowl; it having parted company as the metal where it is riveted or bolted to the frame rusts and degrades - which reminds me, I need somebody to weld mine up before it to suffers a similar fate.
So late Sunday morning I set about swapping the tire. Problem one was undoing the machine screws that retain one of the wheel bearings. Why don't companies that make wheel barrows use bolts? At least then when the head gets covered in concrete its easy to chip of and get a wrench onto, rather than trying to have to chip enough of a slot back into the machine screw head to hold it with a screw driver. Machine screws removed I encountered problem 2, in exactly which tool box, yes I have several, had I put the two tire levers. These were another acquisition I made several years ago, one of those "They'll come in handy at some point" acquisitions.
Anyway after half an hour of turning the workshop upside down I located them and set about swapping the tires. This turned out to be no problem at all, but has demonstrated that the inner tube on the old tire most likely has a puncture, which I'll repair just as soon as I get around to getting a repair kit; sometime next year then.
Next on the list was seed sowing. The Up-To-Date, Pandora, and Greyhound sown 3 weeks ago are all now of a size where they no longer need to be on the propagator, giving me three slots for more seeds. Taking up the slack therefore are All-Year-Round (Cauliflower), a red onion of unknown variety curtosy of Lidls, and the remainder of the Olympia (Brocolli). Hope fully they'll all germinate nicely and enable me to get an early crop of brassica's in the ground in April again.
With lunch on hold whilst the bread defrosted, I decided to get the visit to the Bracknell plot to deposit half of the compost out of the way.
As is the way of things I ended doing slightly more than I had intended but both of the "kids" beds are now weeded and cleaned, and the raspberry/strawberry/artichoke bed (last not by design) is more presentable.
Bed 3 is also now virtually complete after I was able to dig through the dried and thawed spits moved yesterday. Bed 2 is also a little closer to being clear as I moved a further load of spits across onto bed 3. Weather permitting I'll be able to get to these this weekend.
Following a long lunch, and via a detour to get diesel, it was down to the Sunningdale plot to plant the garlic which had arrived with the seed potatoes on Wednesday. I'd unbagged the potatoes yesterday morning and laid them all out in seed trays in the workshop to chit. Garlic planted I set about tidying the 3 4ft square beds in the middle of the plot, distributing the remainder of the compost amongst them. Last on the list was liming the bed I'd dug and manured 2 weeks ago. This technically goes against the grain, but as the manure is dug in 6" down the two won't interact, but the lime will lower the ph for the brassicas and the manure will provide the sustenance the soil needs.
With the light starting to fade, I was tempted to start digging over the remaining "vacent" bed but in the end thought better of it. It was as I was contemplating this that I considered I was doing reasonably well this year, then remembered I still have the asparagus bed to do, all 21 feet of it, and the other half of bed 2 on the Bracknell plot, thats another 18 feet, but this time of pristine undug couch grass ridden clay, and all before the end of March.
May be next year I won't be racing time.