Brassica botrytis?

Is it just me or does "botrytis" sound like something that would keep you off work with a toilet roll cooling in the fridge, and some comfort telly lined up?  That's the botanical for cauliflower, anyways.

This afternoon I got a row of these put in: 49p ones from Lidl. So that's 3 rows in the brassica bed now: neeps, oregano, and caulis. I'm using an old dibber left behind by The Predecessor, and it's exactly 17ins from handle to tip, so that's how far I'm spacing my rows, just to have a bit of uniformity. Enough to get up & down with the hoe, rake, or barrow...

Also today: The Carer at the community plot next door asked me to take the the barbed wire off the new(ish) fence, (that's the W boundary), as somebody had hurt themselves on it, and it was giving him a whole load of Council Health & Safety Risk Assessment stuff to deal with. Well, fair enough. I want to keep Neds out, obvs, but don't want to injure any innocent passers by. Especially when said passers by have not had all the advantages in life many of us enjoy, and are maybe not equipped to keep away from barbed wire.

So I moved the barbed wire to the Southern boundary. It's 8ft tall, a double pallet fence, but actually really easy to climb over. The Auld Fella in that adjoining allotment is hardly ever there, and his other fences are all holes. I suspect that the thief who nicked my Edwardian "EXTRACT" enamel sign came in that way. Not again will anyone cock a leg over that fence, anyhow. The bastards.

1st weeding of the year. Fired up by the prospect that my gorse is going to germinate, I hoed the margin between the fruit bushes and the fence, where the gorse is to go. Nettles, bit of grass, ground elder. I'm just going to hoe it mercilessly once a week or so, until the gorse is ready.



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