Friday 15 July 2011

Blood, sweat, and companion planting

Hi all! I have just had a very nice evening with Iva Carrdus from Transition Bath, planting up a new plot at Trowbridge House which had been kindly dug and weeded by Emma Fowler and Adam Barnett in previous weeks.
We've planted six more tomato plants, bringing us up to a total of 13 over the entire site. This is an unlucky number: I'm not superstitious, I'm just saying, it's unlucky, I don't want any accidents, I'll be planting more tomato plants soon just in case. We also planted carrots, onions, beetroot, and rocket. Yum!
The interesting thing about the above list, is the combination of carrots and onions. This is an example of a clever new fing I've been learning about called 'companion planting'. Companion planting covers a wide variety of gardening practices, but in this case the deliberate combination of onions and carrots is designed to discourage pests: the insects which like carrots hate onions, and the insects which like onions hate carrots. In this way, the vegetables deal with each others' problems, like a happily married couple, or like two X-men with complimentary powers, so maybe like one can shoot fire but they're falling from a plane or something, but then another one can fly so they catch the one that can shoot fire, and then they can both fly around shooting fire, and maybe they can shoot the plane or whatever. I hope this analogy helps you to understand companion planting.
Anyway, here's some photographs from the work.

This is the lovely, knowledgeable Iva, contemplating a line of freshly-sown carrot seeds.



This is Iva again, she is smiling because I've just told her the world's funniest joke. I cannot publish the world's funniest joke on this or any other blog, becaue it would surely mean the end of humanity, with everybody rolling around laughing while their baths overflow and their toast burns. If you want to hear the world's funniest joke, you must come to the next Trowbridge House working evening on Monday 18th July.


This is a really awful photograph of me, which I've included just to demonstrate that it was dark by the time we finished, because we were just that determined to get the plot planted out!


Thanks for reading, I hope you're all doing well. If you're free on the evening of Monday 18th July and you'd like to come do some gardening, then let me know by e-mailing samdrewapicture@gmail.com and I'll ensure there's free biscuits for you all. If I'm in a really good mood, I will even buy you a drink.

2 comments:

  1. Well done Sam, you're doing a great job. I love the blog. It looks great. I'm very proud of you. Keep it up!

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  2. I'm disturbed by how un-straight that carrot row looks and am determined to use the string method next time...

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