The long bank holiday .... priorities for the garden?

[robo]

Another wet and windy day I've fed and cleaned the chickens out put some peelings in the wormary I will spend the afternoon looking through the window or looking at the back of my eye lids

[oldherbaceous]

That's annoying for you Robo....it's been nice and bright here today, just a bit of a chilly wind. But to my surprise, there has been no one working over the allotments apart from me. i can understand no one would be over there at 6am with me, but i have just come back from mowing the grass and apart from Old Codger coming over for a chat, there has been no one.... should i be taking a hint...
Anyway, i have planted the first batch of Cauliflower and Cabbage plants, sown a full row and a half of Broad beans and half a row of Sugar Snap Peas. So we are starting to get there.

[Pawty]

Hi,

Beautiful day on the lotty today. Good job I remembered the sun tan loction. Here's a few of may favourite pics - great to see the pollinators out in force!

Pawty

[Westi]

These guys have been in the ground all winter & I'm pretty chuffed with my experiment to see if I could grow lettuce over winter outside, especially being in the tropical end of England. I've tried before & they got mildew or just died. They don't like clotches I reckon, the red ones & green freckle ones were under a black net tunnel thing & the mixed ones were under plain old shade cloth. On reflection it makes sense with more air circulation, but also seems less protection from hard frosts,

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[Monika]

It's been raining here off and on all day, so no gardening. Now it's clearing up and frost is forecast, so lots of covering up to do.
We could do with some heavy night downpours, followed by a balmy sunny day ..... dream on.

[PLUMPUDDING]

Same here Monika, every time I've got ready to go out it has started raining so I've given up and done all the crosswords and puzzles in the paper.

[tigerburnie]

Nice here, though we had some snow on the hills and it's a cold wind still

[Monika]

Today's sunshine made up for yesterday's wet. The winter brassica seedlings spent their day outside (under close netting to thwart the house sparrows), but they'll come back into the greenhouse in a minute because it certainly looks like frost for tonight.

[retropants]

This is the first Easter we will have actually spent at home for a number of years so I'm hoping we can start doing a little domestic decluttering although Mr Primrose and I have a rather different concept on how far this activity extends, he very much belonging to the "I'm not throwing this away. it might come in useful one day" brigade ! So I have no great expectations.

I'm wondering if it's too early to start sowing my climbing beans in compost filled loo rolls, to be germinated on my window sill?
I can never remember the realistic time to allow between sowing and planting out .

And I've noticed the oxalis and alkanet weeds are starting to take off again despite the dry weather so I suspect a fair amount of painstaking hand weeding is going to be on the agenda at some point!

Primrose...you have alkanet weed? Is the the variety where the roots are used as a natural dye pigment?

[PLUMPUDDING]

The roots are supposed to dye natural fibres a ruby red colour. I keep digging bits up to introduce to my garden but can't get it to establish. Sounds like you've got the opposite problem Primrose.

[retropants]

I used dried Alicanet root as a pigment for my soaps...interested to see what the actual plant looks like!