More gardening

 The plan for today was to transplant the tomato plants to the greenhouse. It almost happened ...

Step one was to clear the chickweed, that had sprouted over the Winter, and that was soon hoed and raked up.  I noticed that the soil was very dry so I followed that up by forking in a couple of barrows of compost. The organic matter will add nutrients and also assist in holding on to moisture. A few handfuls of meat, bone and blood meal were also scattered to further boost the soil fertility.*

I then drenched the soil with several watering cans of water,  but I still wasn't convinced that the soil was sufficiently moist.  Bugger it!  I fired up the well pump and spent the next twenty minutes saturating the parched soil with a couple of hundred litres of water.  Having finished the soaking I decided that planting should be delayed until tomorrow to allow the water to permeate through the soil.

This gave me some spare time, so the afternoon was spent on my knees hand weeding the path that runs through the vegetable garden and around my raspberry canes.  This took most of the afternoon, but was reasonably easy work and very satisfying to see a nice clear path emerge.

I also noted that we seem to have a nice crop of raspberries forming.

---

* We have tried growing tomatoes in grow bags, but we really don't rate them. They are difficult to water, difficult to add supports for the tomato vines, and the plants just don't seem to do that well in them. Pots or  planting directly in to the ground seems to work much better.