De Dah!...Raised Beds. Trousers Covered in Kisses.X

I felt that Trousers hadn't done justice with his photos of the superbly crafted raised beds, so I wanted to do another blog (you are very very spoilt children this week, no?!)  because I'm a great believer in Credit, where credit is due, and obviously, there are more to do yet Trousers darling, ........So here we go:

Having started the Bored Beans off from seed in a polybag next to the Rayburn, then transplanted them into small pots in the warmth of the Conservatory, then chucked them out into the cold 'Mini-Me' Greenhouse, then turfed them out from there into the open ground, with empty pop bottle cloches over them at night, until finally, they're big enough and ugly enough now to stand on their own two feet without any TLC, they're less sappy for the slugs to nibble at, and hopefully, fully hardened off now.

THIS is infinitely better:  Proper photos of proper raised beds, and I've started to section them into workable squares, in order to aid my elusive Holy Grail of a Successional Sowing Technique(!)  (see every seasoned grower nod their head wisely?!)
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 And having been hugely disillusioned in the past with having sown carrot seed, jumped up and down to see it germinate, and then slowly decline into a deep depression to see the germinated seedlings disappear magically overnight with the night forays of the dreaded tiny black keel slugs living in the soil, Wellie, at about two o'clock this morning, had a kind of what I'd call 'A Baldrick Moment', which in Wellie's mind, surmounts to 'A Brilliant Idea':

Which is to sprinkle your chosen Root Fertiliser in the seed-drill, then a layer of weathered soot, and finally, your carrot seed.  The darkness of the soot allows you to see how thinly or thickly you're sowing, and slugs don't like soot.....so you've got a much improved chance of germinating your carrots - she said, licking her finger and sticking it in the air to see which direction the wind is blowing.

I can't profess to have tried it before, but it seems to make sense to me on a sensible growing level, so I'll give it a shot.  I do sprinkle weathered soot into my Potato trenches for the same reason. 

For now, I am going to leave you to get on with your own week, but I'd just like to say that I had a lovely telephone conversation with my friend Gloria today, after many weeks of us both just getting our heads down and getting on with things, and I'm going to see what she's done on her allotment next week, and then she's coming to The Funny Farm to take some serious Seed Sowing Photos after that.

Thank you to each and every one of you who follow my blog, and particularly, to you very new peeps that have joined the mad house!  Bless you.X