Eeeek!!!

The trouble with going down without a plan and playing it by ear is that if you're not careful you end up doing something you start to think better of more or less straight away... All I wanted to do was clear a space for the tomatoes Christine gave us this afternoon and now look.... I've completely dismantled one bed and made a start on another...actually I carted the bits away rather than demolished the beds themselves as they were falling to pieces anyway. The plan now is (probably) to get the tomatoes in and then build the bed round them in the fullness of time.

At this time of year I always start to curse myself for not covering every last bit of soil with groundcover or carpet while the weeds are still dormant...The key here is timing..it's no good trying to dig them out of dry soil. The soil needs to be just drying & crumbly a day or so after rain.

In the foreground you can see that I have finally dug out the potatoes that I had left in last year. I am using the same carpet holes for Purple Sprouting Broccoli and Cavelo de Nero. They are in the greenhouse and raring to be let out into the wild. The carpet in the middle of the first picture I removed in readiness for digging the bed asap. I am wondering about then using it for staggered rows of tomatoes. I don't want to have to reach too far to tie in. sideshoot and pick the tomatoes, though. One of the few drawbacks with raised beds is that it can be slightly more fiddly reaching in to do jobs rather than just wandering down a row.

I am also about to sow some more Crown Prince squashes in pots as the greenhouse ones don't look to happy . I will plant both out asap to give myself two chances.

My guess is that the ones I haven't sown yet will romp away and overtake the yellowing greenhouse specimens.