Tuesday was a lovely summer's day with blue skies from dawn until dusk and pretty warm in the afternoon as the temperature made it up to 25.8°C or 78.4°F.
On Sunday we made some provisional plans for sowing some carrots and Pak Choi. One small bed was cleared of some seeded rocket and salad leaves but instead of digging over the ground it was given a good watering.
I reckon the size of the bed is about 10 sq/m and I tipped 10 watering cans of water over the bed. Each can contained 10 litres of water. By my calculation that should be equivalent to 10mm (0.4in) of rainfall. At the time it seemed a bit over the top but the water disappeared into the soil and didn't leave any standing on the surface. I felt certain my rough depth of rainfall calculation was correct. Working in metric units the answer definitely had a one in it, just a case of units and had I got the decimal point in the correct place. We decided to leave the bed overnight and see if it would dig over on Monday afternoon when we visited the plot.
When we arrived on Monday afternoon things didn't look too promising. The sunshine had certainly dried out the top of the soil and it certainly didn't look like it had been watered copiously the day before. The sunshine hadn't baked the surface of the soil into a hard surface which was a positive sign. But then the intention was that there would still be some moisture underneath and the bed would dig over using our cultivator.
I could tell as soon as the cultivator started working its way through the soil that the watering had worked a treat and the bed dug over very easily leaving a tilth that we could sow directly into.
We managed to sow Pak Choi and a row of late carrots in the bed above. There will be some room for a few short rows of radish and one or two lettuce plants at a later date. Unless the dry spell ends though we will have to keep the bed well watered if we want the seeds to germinate. It's amazing how many cans of water are needed to replicate a decent day's rainfall.
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