A Stunner

Easter Monday’s weather was brilliant with unbroken sunshine all day. My weather station recorded 9.2 hours of sunshine which is the best since 04 August 2014 with 9.3 hours. It was also our warmest day of the year with the thermometer hitting 19.8°C (67.6°F).

We made the most of the excellent weather with another afternoon visit to the plot. Sue started planting up our new strawberry bed and I set to clearing away the last of our overwintered carrots and parsnips.

Just over half of our new strawberry bed is planted up. We still have some late varieties to plant. We’ll have a few plants left over so it might well be that another bed is taken over with our excess strawberry plants. I might be able to cope with that.

I wanted to clear away the carrot and parsnip debris so that the bed could be left to dry out for a few days in the dry weather. Hopefully it will then be in a fit state to cultivate. 

One or two parsnips were growing strongly. These roots had been missed for winter harvesting, hidden rather too well under their protective bed of straw. A couple of rather ugly looking carrots remained too. These were all cleared away to the compost heap.

It’s a bit tricky moving the weed control fabric that the carrots and parsnips are grown through. It has so many slits cut into it that it won’t easily fold up to be moved or stored for a few days until this year’s carrot bed is cultivated. I had a couple of wooden stakes so I decided to see if the fabric would roll up on these.

It worked pretty well the only drawback is that the fabric and debris all rolled up are an awkward shape and a bit heavy to lift.  

The bed’s now cleared and can have a few days drying out. It doesn't look too bad in the photo above but I did try turning a few spade fulls over and it is very wet and claggy under the surface. 

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett