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Well at last I’m up to date with my veggie year plan.  After a trip to town, in smart non-muddy clothes, proper shoes and no dogs in toe I came home to do some serious planting.

Cabbage - young & old.

It doesn’t matter if I approach Mr Bitem our purveyor of fine veggie plugs with a categorical list and steely determination I always end up with what he decides to give me really.  It doesn’t help that I immediately forget the most basic Catalan and Spanish words for things because he’s so damned scary!

For example today started well – I asked for 400 onions, he gave me 400ish onions.  Then I asked for col – that is cabbage and Mr Bitem even said yes he had green and white cabbage smiling and saying cabbage in English to show how his language skills are coming on faster than mine.  Next I wanted Cos lettuce – no problem.  My final requirement was some cauliflower col-i-flor in Catalan.  Mr Bitem laughed, pointed to my ‘cabbage’ and told me I already had them – green and white.  I did get the additional cabbage – green only, eventually.  I’m never sure if its me, him or if he just likes to confuse me on purpose.

New onion bed

So anyway, I digress.  The afternoon returned to dirty normality – my worn mountain clothes came back out of the cupboard and I got down to some rather serious planting.  A lot of onions are in, plus many cauliflowers, cabbages and lettuces.  I did run out of enthusiasm for onion planting though and admitted defeat.  Only about 120 left to plant tomorrow.  Yesterday Big D put all the carrot seeds in too (under plastic to keep them toasty) so all in all its been a hectic week of planting here on the mountain.

Why is there much less room to plant things in, when you have things to plant than when you’re just thinking about what to plant?  I even had to plant the lettuce round the new apriocot tree.  That’s a spot I was keeping for something pretty and flowery once the weather warmed up a bit.

lettuce in the flower bed

Some of the cabbages ended up filling in space where I’ve picked mature cabbages recently.  That’s okay though as the plot won’t have been a home for cabbages for more than 9 months or so in total and once we finish eating them I’ll rotate something completely different into the bed for a few years.  I fear the evils of club root even though we have had no issues at all with our brassicas – well other than caterpillars, birds, and most destructively of all our dogs chasing the birds off the cabbage patch and doing a fair amount of trampling in the process.  Oh well, I’m sure I’ll find somewhere to fit the onions.  At least it doesn’t matter if they’re a bit squished together as I can just use them as scallion / spring onions to thin them out in another month or so.  That’s always nice as UK style spring onions are not really available here and sometimes all you want is a little onion!