Nervous Planting Out!

Last Tuesday's disaster with the sharp frost has dented my confidence a little. The temperatures in London today are almost up into the 70s and set to go higher this weekend. So I decided to be brave and start to plant out some tender veggies. A few weeks ago I emptied the well rotted kitchen compost bin into a trench and cover with soil. I have now planted my runner beans. A few have been started in modules and a few more planted from seed. I am trying a new variety this year St George.

A few lettuces have started to grow well now, these are Winter Density and Labacher Ice. Very frost hardy and beautiful flavour. Note the Poached Egg plant in the foreground. Just a little encouragement for the pollinating insects.

I planted out these climbing beans Mrs Fortune's today as well. These are an old heritage variety kindly given to me last year by Celia at Purple Podded Peas. It is great to keep these old varieties alive and pass them on to other growers.

Chicken Patty (white) and Chicken Joloff (black) have come to stay for a week while DaVikka goes up North for a while.

Buddy was just curious, but as usual took everything in his stride and went about his business after a brief inspection of these new lodgers.

I think he was interested in the food scraps in their bowl! Doesn't his coat look wonderfully shiny in the sunshine!

Anyway, after a warm afternoon's planting out we sat down for a game of shove ha'penny. A couple of years ago I attended an evening class in French Polishing, I found this shove hapenny board at a car boot sale and restored it.

This is an ancient old English pub game, and like most other 'non screen based' table games, it is quite absorbing. The aim of the game is to gently shove the hapennys across the board and have them land exactly between the lines.

Official tokens were used in the game, in the absence of the real thing!