Sun block

I've been feeling anxious lately. It's not like me to feel that way, I think it's the prospect moving house or at least the mammoth amount of renovation we have to do before we can even move in. I went to the allotment to get away from it all, to be soothed by the sea of green.

The giant sunflowers seemed to have claimed the patch as their own. Their canopy closing in above everything else, their huge paddle leaves following the sun and not spilling a drop.

Old bulbs: dying garlic

I took out a couple of tall plants overshadowing the beans and pruned some of the lower and larger leaves off some of the others to let light back into the plot.

Thrifty: saved calendula seed

I took out the floriferous chicory (the one we had waited for so long to break into flower…) and numerous marauding calendulas. After an hour there was space again and the place could breathe and I could breathe with it.
I cleared another patch of earth and planted four lines of chicory seed that I had bought at a market in Chioggia in northern Italy last winter. Each packet containing agricultural quantities of seed, enough to plant a vast field in Lincolnshire.

Planted: rows of Italian chicory for autumn and winter eating

I watered them into just as a big black cloud and a clap of thunder came along to do the job properly…