6th June 2016 - Wear Sunscreen

As you may have worked out from my title this week, I really burnt myself this weekend; I knew it was going to be a sunny day so when I arrived I put my sunscreen on my face, arms and the back of my neck.  I use Ultrasun which is one that you put on at the start of the day and you don't have to reapply.  It is really good and I have always found it to be great, when I put it on.  Unfortunately however, I was so hot yesterday that I decided to roll up my shirt and tie it with a hair tie (like I used to do at school) and completely forgot to put sunscreen on my back.  I am therefore burnt to a cinder and in lots of pain.  So for goodness sake, don't forget to wear your sunscreen all the time!

Anyway, on to happier things.  This weekend I had all my beds in place and all I had to do was fill my last one.  I debated about getting another ton of topsoil but at £40-£45 it seemed like more than I needed and whilst buying bags of topsoil/compost/manure is costly if you're going to do it to fill all of the beds as a one off with a total cost of £29 I have saved a minium of £11 if I could have gotten the cheaper topsoil.  This bed is my rogue bed of flowers.  I wanted to have a cut and come again flower bed but also I'm hoping all of the flowers will attract lots of pollinators to my crops.  

The other job I had wanted to get done this week was look at my irrigation system.  I work full time and often long hours, it's not unusual for me to arrive at site as everyone else is leaving in the evening.  My thought was that if I could set up an irrigation system that I can arrive on site, turn on the tap and be doing other jobs while my crops are being watered.  

http://www.waterirrigation.co.uk/watering-kits/outdoor-watering/drip-kits/kingfisher-micro-irrigation-set.html

I used a micro irrigation set, which includes the tubing, drippers, connectors etc.  I'm worked hard to set the system up and thought a lot about ensuring the drip lines were set correctly, it recommends the first line is higher than the next and so on, my plot does have a slight slop and luckily the tap is in the right place to help me make that happen.  It recommended that the drippers were 12" apart, which I did but then there weren't enough of them.  I also don't know what I expected but 1 line in a 3' wide bed isn't enough to really water the bed fully, so I need to do more work on it but I'm hopeful that I can make it work as I want.

I really feel now like I'm atually going to start to be able to focus on growing, all of my building work is done and whilst there's still areas to tidy up and I still need to get the rest of my weed membrane down, before transporting (I can't even imagine how much) woodchips up to cover the paths.

I will be back up at the plot tomorrow, hopefully with a last piece of MDPE pipe for my cloches from Freegle, I know that my potato beds need weeding and I'm pretty sure that I saw some bind weed on my raspberries as I left and didn't have time to go back and look at properly.  

So until next week - happy gardening