Brassicas, carrots, and water

I finally got a chance to plant out the brassicas today! There had been a bit of a calamity earlier in the week, when one of the shelves in the cold frame collapsed, taking the purple sprouting broccoli, globe artichokes and French bean (yes, singular!) with it. I rescued most stuff, but it brought home the need to plant out the broccoli in particular to give the disturbed seedlings the best chance for survival.

So we now have a couple of rows of purple sprouting broccoli, almost a row of cabbage, and just over 2 rows of Brussels sprouts. There's a still a row or so of Brussels seedlings left to plant out, but the sun had nearly set by the time we got that far, so it was time to call it a day.

Having planted the brassicas out, though, we had to get the netting set up, or what was there would be eaten by caterpillars like last year. The netting was only a few cm wider than the bed itself, so not wide enough to stand a foot off the plants and still reach the ground. We turned the netting around by 90 degrees, and it was wide enough that way to cover the area we've planted up today. We've rolled the rest of it up for now - will work out what to do with it all later. It seems a shame to cut it up, but we may need to.

Today also brought the first sightings (at least, by me) of carrots seedlings! I'd just about given up on them, but there are are definitely seedling leaves and even a few of the fluffy leaves in places. We gave them all a good watering, so hopefully they'll continue to flourish.

Finally, the pump has been fixed, which is wonderful news. It'd got to the point where it took about 5 minutes to fill a watering can, but now it takes about 10 seconds - that's better than it's ever been while we've been there. If the summer is as dry as they're predicting, at least the watering won't be as hard work as I feared. Last week, when it was taking ages to pump anything at all, I was being so careful not to spill a drop, as it was all so hard-won. It's given me a new appreciation of quite how precious water is to people who have to walk hours to fetch it both for themselves and to water their fields.