A head scratching kind of evening

Today started badly. My milk went off in the process of making my porridge, I reacted badly to my coffee and ended up doing a loo trip every 10 mins for most of the morning and my nemesis returned to work. It would have been easy to ignore ‘her who shall never be spoken about’ if it hadn’t been for the position of her desk next to the toilet doors. I am now strictly off the coffee and back on to herbal tea…..

There were some high points today which I was glad about.  I have been trying to establish where the office shredding goes and today I got permission to remove the shredding and recycle it into the compost bin rather than the office bins. I staggered to the car with two sacks of shredding as fast as I could despite the odd looks I received from my colleagues. I’m working on a plan to harvest their teabags but haven’t quite figured how to persuade a whole office without being asked if I’m a) wierd or b) a grot bag. I’m not sure which option would be worse. 

As soon as I was in the car on the way to the plot I felt my work stress lift and a smile  reappear. That was definitely helped by seeing my thermometer reading at double digits (a hot 12 degrees) for the first time in probably 2 weeks. 

Once I got to the allotment I spotted what I thought was fly tipping but as I got nearer I realised it was a pile of woodchip. I got to my wheelbarrow pronto to get the woodchip before someone else grabbed it. 

What puzzled me though was the location of my spade, or rather the lack of it. Initially I thought I had put my spade in the greenhouse but it wasn’t there. Then I thought it may be in the Anderson shelter but it wasn’t there. Time pressures caused me to improvise with a bucket as a giant scoop (which worked excellently). On my final load I went in search of my rake to find yet again it was mislaid. Nope, I was wrong. After a quick search I confirmed it was missing. It’s so frustrating that this is the second time my stuff has gone walkies. The most annoying bit isn’t that it’s missing, it’s the thought process where you are wandering around looking, then think you may be crazy or having early onset dementia and then realise someone has swindled you. AGAIN. I had to do a fair amount of leaf touching and deep breathing to get over this one! I have decided to return tomorrow and have a thorough walk all around the plots to see if it has been borrowed or moved out of mischief. I hope it is kids because it would sadden me to have a fellow plant lover acquire my things against my wishes. 

Right now it’s pretty quiet on the sowing front as everything has been sown, or recently potted on so all I have to do is water. So far everything has survived the temperature rise and infrequent watering but I’m going to have to step up to daily watering now as the weather is beginning to heat up and is forecast to stay this way. Hooray!

This evening I potted on a few tomatoes, observed that my 2nd sowing of lettuce has begun to sprout, my herbs are coming up in ones or twos and my foxgloves have had a growth spurt. It’s funny that even though you plant things at the same time they all grow differently.  Bit like people I suppose. 

The next stage in the plot plan will be to move plants to their beds. I will probably do this over the next 10 days or so. I must remember to put my hand tools in the car so I don’t end up using my hands to dig.