Everything is growing beautifully

We were both up before six this morning and, after an early breakfast, we got started with the day's activities.

Mission #1 was to give the hatching eggs a good clean in egg sanitiser before placing them in the incubator and starting off the next twenty one day incubation cycle.  I then continued in the poultry vein, cleaning out the brooder and ensured that our first batch of chicks had plenty of food and clean water.

I then headed out to the orchard where 30% had applied herself to weeding the pumpkin patch. In the past couple of months the pumpkin plants have run riot. After a slow start they suddenly put on a growth spurt and the six plants have now completely taken over the old poultry run and are pushing out vigorous shoots across the grass. Pumpkin fruits are starting to form on the vines and the largest of which is close to eight inches in diameter.

We spent a good couple of hours placing tiles under each of the young fruits to lift them clear of the damp earth and reduce the risk of rot. We also cleared the remaining debris from the now demolished chicken house. This old shed appeared to have been built on a foundation of railway sleepers, loose bricks and whatever else came to hand. I swear I even extracted an enamel dish and a baking cooling rack from the ground this morning.

With the another part of the orchard decontaminated, we lunched and then headed in to the afternoon.  30% "headed" straight to bed for a nap, and I wandered over to the computer and attempted to find inspiration for yesterday's Journal entry.

After taking it easy during the heat of the day, we wandered back out to the garden. I thinned the beetroot seedlings to ten centimetre spacings and then mowed a strip in the orchard, where 30% wanted to clear and prune. After a few minutes of this, we both decided that it was far too hot for manual labour and, instead, decided to head off in search of edging for the small bed we cleared on Monday.

The bed is shallow, narrow,  dry and its soil is impoverished. We would like to install edging that would allow us to increase the depth of soil, but everything we looked at either wouldn't work or looked bloody awful.  In the end I decided that I might be able to do something innovative in a rustic fashion with some corrugated iron that is kicking around in the orchard ... I will either be feeling smug or bloody frustrated, depending on how that pans out.

In other gardening news; the tomato crop has now started to ripen and we have tasted the first of the Bloody Butcher fruits. They are tasty enough, but not as good as Alicante in either flavour or vigour. I can also report that the Spring cabbage seedlings have already started to shoot, barely four days after planting ... not bad for seeds that passed their expiry date three months ago.