There's not a lot of my garden left that isn't already devoted to growing veg. There's the circle of grass in the middle where we put up the washing line, the concrete path and the grass paths to the shed and the water butts. None of them could go. We need all of them. But what was dispensable was the grass path between the concrete patio at the back of our house and the circle of lawn for the washing line.
It is with some sadness that I have dug it up, as it was a useful thoroughfare in the garden, made watering easier, gave a greater sense of space and was appealing to look at. Well, I say I dug it up, my husband dug it up for me and it was hell to do. I know, as I had already tried.
It was as dry as dust and packed hard together. We had to water it several times to make it possible to get into it at all. In normal circumstances, I wouldn't have dug it up. But these aren't normal times. The coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown have meant rules in shops about how many items you can buy at once and the dry spring means farms may not be able to produce as much food usual, so it makes sense to grow as much food as possible. And in particular, the vegetable I use the most of is tomatoes, so it makes sense to expand my tomato bed.
I hope that this change is not permanent and that I will be able to return this area of grass in 2021 or 2022. I don 't think I will dare do it at the end of the tomato season this year. Instead, I will want to wait and see how this pandemic and the food supply are panning out. I only hope that after so little rain and with no spare compost, the soil is adequate for growing tomatoes in this year.
I have also made a decision about how to grow tomatoes in London. On Gardener's World Monty Don always tells us not to put our tomatoes outdoors until the end of June. But I think he is basing this on the temperatures in the rest of the UK, not London temperatures. One thing that convinces me of this is my tomatoes that have self-seeded in this year's root vegetable bed.
They are much bigger, healthier and more vigorous (and less leggy) than the tomatoes I grew indoors. One even has flowers on it already. So, from now on I am going to carry on sowing tomatoes indoors, but I am also going to sow seeds outdoors in April where I want them to grow (or possibly even earlier, as they appear not to grow until they are ready, however long they've been in the soil). I will continue to grow tomatoes indoors as a back up, but I will plant these out in mid or late May unless it's an unusually cold or wet year or frost is forecast. I get self-seeded tomatoes in my garden most years, so they are clearly perfectly capable of surviving here.
This year, I don't have enough tomato plants to fill my new bed, as I am rejecting one as too straggly and weak, so I intend to plant one of these self-seeded tomatoes in the new bed. This isn't technically a good idea for crop rotation reasons, but given that I have no known tomato disease anywhere in my garden and that I am hoping to turn this bed back into lawn before tomatoes reach that bed again in my rotation, I think it should be OK.
Finally, whilst he was digging up the new bed, my husband turned up a small pile of large stones, a piece of rusty pipe and what looks like a flint spearhead or similar tool.
It has been shaped to a sharp edge all around it through the rock being chipped away. I don't know if this is a genuine archaeological find or whether a modern person decided to create it using ancient techniques, but either way it's an interesting thing to have found in the garden.
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