Digging into Alabama Fudge Cake

I wish.

However, the soil on our plot at the allotment reminds me of it. As SomeBeans* digs into it, it looks like a cake slice going into a rich, chocolatey cake. Good enough to eat.

With the warmth of the sun over the past week or so, it will soon be sowing time. I haven't yet resorted to the old gardener's method of telling whether the soil is warm enough to plant. That method is, allegedly, to drop your trousers and sit on the soil. If the soil is warm enough to remain seated on, then it is warm enough to sow. I think I might worry the plot neighbours if I did this; instead, it's handy to keep an eye on the weed activity.

Our plot is 'blessed' with a wide range of weeds to help us do this. The ephemeral weeds such as hairy bittercress seem to have survived the cold weather very well. They haven't quite started growing yet. It's the perennials which are showing signs of stirring, and we have plenty of those. Although the horsetails haven't quite poked their noses above the ground, you can find evidence of them rising to the surface when you dig. The real early bird is ground elder, the leaves of which are now starting to show.

I don't blog about the allotment very often. Partly because I rarely remember to take a camera down there. The main reason, however, is that there are only so many ways of writing about weeding. Digging up deep-rooted perennials, hoeing annuals, forking out couch grass roots. That's about it, really. If the gods in Tartarus had been keener horticulturalists, Sisyphus would have been damned to eternal weeding instead of the simpler task of rolling a boulder up a hill. Still, I suppose that's the flip side of having soil as rich as an Alabama fudge cake.

*Poor SomeBeans. He does do most of the digging. I think he enjoys it.