National Vegetable Society Meeting

National Vegetable Society Meeting.

It was our district association meeting last night and what a good one it was. For a start we had a good turn out. I think we had about 25 people turn up. It’s always a bit of a worry that we’ve booked a speaker who has travelled many miles only to find an audience of 5 people including the committee.

The generosity of these speakers who give up their time to trundle down the motorway and share their knowledge really amazes me.

Our speaker last night was Dave Hampsey who is on the national executive of the society and an RHS lecturer as well as a qualified vegetable show judge. Dave’s wife, Dorothy, had a fall a few weeks ago and it turned out she had fractured her neck so she’s in hospital at the moment so nobody would have blamed Dave if he had bowed out but he insisted on coming.

His talk was, as usual with Dave, general and off the cuff. Covering everything from coping with club root to carrot root fly and organic versus conventional growing. As he pointed out, when you grow your own vegetables you know exactly what chemicals have been used on them.

Neither are his talks dry, we were all in stitches at points with his jokes. A thoroughly good night out.

One last point on generosity, our DA is funded from a raffle and Susie Mitchell turned up with a big carrier bag full of prizes. Thanks to all.

Off the Plot

I had an email mentioning that I’d not updated this diary for a bit so here is an update since the last entry on Wednesday 7^th February.

Thursday the snow arrived as promised but not six inches here, enough to stop play though and Friday was even worse. By Saturday it was melting away so on Sunday I headed down to the plot to continue digging over plot 5.

Now digging over means, to me, a trench into which the soil is turned creating a new trench and so forth. Well my trench was full of water. So I dug a relief channel down slope to let it drain and then started. As the spade went in there was a sucking noise and as the soil came out water appeared to fill up the gap. So back home as there was no way I could do anything of value there.

Monday it rained, so that wouldn’t help the soil dry out and yesterday, Tuesday, was fine but the soil would still have been pretty soggy.

So here we are, a week gone by and as I write this on Wednesday morning it has rained again overnight.

Working

The one good thing is that I’m catching up with work whilst I cannot skive off to the plot.

I’ve recently finished a site for a French estate agent – Belle France Property ? and I’ve been busy getting the subsidiary sites up, Property Limousin and Property Poitou-Charentes so they’re done now. Still got Property Normandy to finish, it’s a one holding page job at present., but that will have to wait for a week.

Now I’m working on a new site for our forum members the Handscombes about Gardening in Spain. There’s not much to see there at the moment and what there is changes every few minutes as I fiddle about with it, but I think it will be a really useful site for anyone in Spain or Southern France ? probably useful for those in the hotter and dryer states in the USA as well.

The only problem with doing these property sites is that I’m getting the urge to move. Properties that I’d love with huge and I mean huge gardens for prices we can afford. One day, one day