A good morning

Accuweather says rain starting in 65 minutes. It's possible, I suppose. There are some clouds scooting in our direction but they don't look like rain clouds. Mr Snoop reckons it won't rain. Thunderstorm forecast for tomorrow. Please, no hail.

I've got sunburn on the back of my neck. Obviously brighter and hotter than I realised this morning. I was tricked by the breeze into thinking it wasn't that bad. Ouch. That's a first for me since we've been here.

Still, got quite a bit done this morning. Put in peas and French beans, raked out a bed ready for melon seeds, planted out two courgettes, earthed up one of the rows of potatoes and whacked down the weeds growing in one of the paths. My hands are aching a bit after all that bashing, especially while doing the path as the ground is dry and hard (the rows and paths are 15 metres long). Will try and get the parsnips done, or at least some of them, this evening when it's a bit cooler.

Bit disappointed I didn't put more peas in, but Mr Snoop said he had his eyes on the mesh I had my eyes on. And fair's fair, he did buy it, though years ago and he's never used it. He gave me a different bit of chain-link fencing he found at the tip. Quite short (just under 3 metres) and I reckon it could flap about in the wind, so as well as the bits of rebar to hold it in place, I got him to peg it down a bit with guy ropes. Bet someone trips over them at some point, probably me.

The fact that the length of mesh is shorter than I wanted meant that I could put some French beans in the gap. These are seeds (Strike) from last year, so I hope they germinate OK. We liked them last year - very productive, great flavour and texture. Like an idiot, I bought some fancy French beans (Compass) off Dobies on a free postage offer. Should have chosen more carefully. The beans look good but as far as I can see from elsewhere on the Web, they set all at the same time. Great, I guess, for Americans who can them and for the agricultural industry, but not particularly for me. I'll have to find places to slot them in, but it's a bit of a waste of growing space. Two months at least for a single crop, though I suppose you could say the same about lettuce, and I've got plenty of them, with more planned.

As a reward for all my efforts, I decided to furtle in the Arran Pilots, just to see like. Then, of course, I decided to get the fork and just go for it and dig a plant up. Nary a one stabbed and very nice they were too. Not had these before. Perhaps still slightly prefer Dunluce for their nutty flavour, but brilliant texture and very creamy (they made a very superior mash when crushed into the melted butter on my plate). Two months, pretty much to the day since they went in. Smallish in size but a generous portion for two.

Digging them up wasn't too much of a sacrifice. We have far too many first earlies: a kilo of Arran Pilots, a kilo of Dunluce and a gift of 30 French Bonnotte de Noirmoutier seed potatoes, which I reckon will turn out to be like Jersey Royals: brilliant grown in their proper place (island of Noirmoutier) but ordinary if you can't provide the right soil. A generous gift even so, so I shouldn't be ungrateful. And I've got some seaweed extract fertiliser for them in a bid to create the right conditions as best I can. In addition, we have Charlottes, Red Emmalie, Roosters and Pink Fir Apple. So we won't be going short of potatoes this year. Perhaps not so good given that I've just read that eating potatoes four times a week gives you high blood pressure! Maybe home-grown ones have more of a calming effect because they're so rewarding, though the stress of not knowing whether you have a crop or not probably counterbalances that. A few years back, I vowed never to grow potatoes again because they're so cheap to buy. Just goes to show how much we've managed to improve the soil that I actually think they're a rewarding crop.

Mr Snoop wanted to know how much the Arran Pilots would have cost to buy in the shops. He assumed they would be very expensive. But the thing is, you can't buy potatoes like that here, not even in our rural community where lots of people grow their own veg. When we lived in Barcelona, I never even saw potatoes like this in Boquería market. So that makes them priceless!

Despite all the stuff I've managed to get done, I'm definitely playing catch-up. The cold spring has held everything back. I didn't even sow the courgettes till 8 April. The first year I grew them, they were in the ground on 10 April (though I had no idea what I was doing back in those days and I was very lucky not to lose them to frost). My tomatoes went out a month after I'd normally put them in and are barely 15 cm tall. First frost due in just four and a half months. Wood burning stove likely to come back into use in less than four. What a bizarre thought.