Day One Without a Car

Well today is day one without a car and as the weather this morning was lovely and sunny, I decided to get on with potting on my veg plants. Yesterday, before the car's MOT expired, I topped up my compost supply and I was desperately hoping that the 6 bags of compost would be enough to re-pot all the veg I have been growing and also the veg plants I fetched from my friend at the market yesterday, which would also need potting on. 

Because of my knee problem, digging over the veg beds has been near impossible so, with raised bed planting not an option this year, I really needed to come up with a plan B. Luckily, I don't throw anything away and have a decent plant pot collection of all shapes and sizes so planting the various veg into a collection of big pots and tubs became the plan B. I also had another dilemma. My garden looks a lot like a field at the moment and I have a terrible slug problem so I wanted to avoid standing the pots on the lawn in order to keep them as far away from the buggers as possible. I also wanted to keep the pots on the patio so they're close by for watering a weeding and suchlike so in true wilderness, pioneering spirit, I built myself a bench from 2 old raised bed stood on top of each other with a couple of planks of wood across the top to stand the post on. I love it and I'm hoping that it does the job and keeps the slugs and snails off the plants. It also gives my back a bit of a rest too :-)

I also got a bit creative when I ran out of space on the bench for my tomato plants to go. Two of the plants were "Tumbling Toms Yellow" so I planted them into a couple of old red hanging basket pots that used to have strawberries in them and hung them onto 2 shepherds-crook-type posts which originally had hanging lanterns on them but which had gone missing several years ago ...... I told you I never throw anything away, I've had those hanging posts sitting in the shed for almost 5 years and I knew that eventually they would be useful for something :-)

I haven't missed the car today at all but I'm guessing that as time goes on and I run out of more things I'm going to start feeling it a lot more. I discovered this morning that I have run out of soft toy stuffing which I usually get from a shop about 7 miles away so I'm having to look on the internet for some and work out if it's more cost effective to order it that way or whether I should just bite the bullet and get a taxi on payday and stock up on all the stuff I need from that shop all in one go. Dilemma dilemma dilemma ......

Anyway, the potting on is done for now and in my little veg garden I now I have 3 different types of tomatoes, 2  squash plants, some French beans, some spinach, some sugar snap peas, some cut and come again lettuce, some courgette plants, an aubergine plant and a whole lot of herbs including basil, parsley, thyme and sage. Plenty to be going on with.