Épuisée

This morning I was feeling a lot better so I whizzed into Pézenas to hire a rotavator. Ours is complete rubbish and falling to pieces and I'm not up to digging the vegetable garden by hand. The one I hired is twice the size of ours and took some wrestling; at one point I did wonder if digging might have taken less energy.

Having rotavated one of the beds I realised I wouldn't have the strength today to do four of them. Concentrate on doing one well, I decided. I dug in four buckets of home-produced compost along with lots of buckets of grape pips and skins from last year's harvest. My hope is that this will help lighten our red clay soil. (Blippers Localfoodlover and Pilipo were around for our harvest so they'll know exactly where the pips and skins came from)

Once the soil was ready I planted 18 more tomatoes, another half dozen courgettes and a couple of rows each of bobby beans and sweetcorn. Finally I pumped some water from the well to water everything in. I'll go back tomorrow with some mulching material to keep the soil from drying out so quickly.

This afternoon I took the rotavator back and bought 30 of those metal grilles you put in wet concrete. My plan is to make them into upright circular supports for the tall tomatoes. I still have loads of tomato plants in the greenhouse and nowhere prepared for them yet, but at least all 30 courgette plants are in.

Now I'm feeling exhausted, but delighted to have felt better enough to have been able to do some work in the vineyard potager for the first time in a fortnight.