Spring in our garden

So it turns out that our garden is not immune to Graeme's constructions. Here is one he made earlier:

Nicknamed the "nano-tunnel" it is 1m square and will house some oriental salads once I have bought some enviromesh to staple to the frame. Possibly a little unconventional for a border right by the front door but I like it anyway!

We have given our front lawn a haircut too:

The daffodils that have sprung up in the middle of the lawn are not meant to be there ... I will move them to the flower borders in the next week. We have saved the grass clippings to line the trenches for the potatoes (as suggested on the RHS web-site). The daffodils are beginning to bloom now. Here's a pic of the border the other side of the path:

Looking very spring-like! We have a lovely display of cyclamen and pulmonaria at the end of the front garden:

The black grasses (no idea what variety) were iridescent in the sunshine. In the back garden there is much less to see except a hellebore which has flowered its socks off and is going over now:

And a hyacinth in full bloom:

Note to self: Need more spring flowering bulbs in back garden!

Finally, this is where all the seed action is taking place for the allotment:

The green buckets house my dahlia tubers which I am hoping to bring on under cover until the frosts are over.

Little post - done some digging

Last post, continued, in a nutshell - cleared some of the leek patch (this is going to be a leeky week) now mostly there - one decent session and the potato bed will be ready. Got room for the two rows of first earlies to go in:

Fantastic weather here this weekend - if it stays like this for a few weeks the allotment will be done and dusted by the end of May. Also had the good fortune to step outside on Friday morning and see a pretty good partial eclipse:

Photo taken from phone, really not the best tool for astronomical photography :o)

A bit of digging & sowing

Since we will be planting our seed potatoes in a few weeks time, we need to clear the bed containing the leeks (adjacent to the onions). I made a bit of a start today:

Conditions for digging were quite good as we have had some rain in the last few days so the soil is quite malleable. Lots of bindweed though, making it slow going. I think it will take a few weeks to get the leek patch dug over. The allotment is looking quite nice now. Here's another view from the compost bin:

Our new neighbours are also making good progress turning their patch. The frame in the foreground is going to be a little patch for our daughter to grow flowers and veg (location yet to be decided!).

In other news, I planted lots of flower seeds last weekend given to me for my birthday (see this post). The dill and cosmos were planted in Feb and are doing well in the utility.

All my seedlings are doing well, below are a few pics.

Here's the cayenne chillis in the (unheated) propagator:

The tray of alpine strawberries have proved disappointing... I only have 4 or 5 plants.

The tomatoes are getting too big for their pots so will need potting on soon:

Garlic chives can be seen in the pot to the left of the toms.

The first batch of leeks are doing well:

And the second batch of leeks are now germinating:

They seem to germinate better on a windowsill rather than in the propagator.

Digging clay and planting onions

Went to the allotment this morning to get some more digging done and plant some onions. The onions are "Sturon" we had grown from sets, from RHS: "Sturon AGM: A popular and reliable onion with excellent flavour and medium-sized bulbs that store well over winter." We grew these before & they do indeed keep very well. Due perhaps to rather generous spacing these are now covering some 20% or so of the plot:

Lots of work from Helen & Emily doing this, happy I think to have it done:

While they were busy with this I was trying to dig the other side of the plot which is an interesting composite material made from heavy clay and bindweed roots:

However after an hour or so more digging am starting to run out of clay to dig - gutted:

Think much later in the year will need to get a lot of organic material mixed in to try and break this down some.

In other news, we now have neighbours on the plot just south of us 17B - have yet to meet them but they appear to have made a good start on clearing. Hopefully this will help to keep weeds down on this side of the plot...

Carrot planter

Yesterday we moved Graeme's construction to the allotment:

Notice how the soil is already drying out? We definitely need to get some more organic material in there this autumn. We filled each side of the planter with 2*56 litres of general purpose compost mixed with some topsoil from part of the plot where the soil is in good condition (where the fork is in the right of the pic). In the right-most planter I sowed three rows of seeds:

Carrot Autumn King 2
Carrot Early Nantes 5
Beetroot Boltardy

In other news, the onion sets have sprouted roots and green shoots. I have moved these outside to harden off. The first batch of leek seeds are continuing to germinate ... I probably have about 80-100 plants now! I should have held off with the second sowing as we are now in danger of being overrun with them!

Upcycling: pallets to raised bed

Had good fortune to visit the waste wood collection area at work just after the pallet fairy had been and managed to save a couple from being firewood. After most of yesterday sawing, hammering and painting green of bits of wood arrived at:

Does not look like much but should be spot on for carrot growing (I hope!) Idea of the blue pipe is to support some mesh. Looks a bit twisted on the bottom picture as the ground it's on is not flat, but won't me a problem once we get this to the plot, though moving this will be bit of fun...

Potting up seedlings

Saturday afternoon was devoted to potting up some of our seedlings. I used soil-based John Inns No.2 compost from our local garden centre (apparently designed for potting on). First up was our onion seedlings. These have been potted into individual plastic cells and have joined the onion sets and chitting potatoes in our utility:

Despite a few casualties in the potting up process there were 84 survivors (out of approx 100 seeds sown).
The door at the end of the pic remains firmly bolted so nobody can inadvertently squash anything! Next up were the brassicas:

You might just be able to makes out the (rather muddy) masking tape demarcating the 8 cabbages (on the rhs) from the 7 cauliflowers (on the lhs). These are also living in the utility. The oriental salads were also ready to be potted on:

These have been potted into biodegradable pots to minimise root disturbance when planting out. Although there are meant to be 4 types of plants (Mizuna, Cima Rapa, Green Pak Choi and Red Mustard), I could only spot 2 different types of seedlings so it will be interesting to see what we get when they are a bit bigger!

The chillis each have a 3-inch pot of their own in the propagator now:

I kept the 8 best plants. The alpine strawberries are taking forever to germinate (left-hand tray), I only have 4 plants thus far. The right-hand tray contains leek seeds (second sowing).

The tomatoes have been moved onto a sunny windowsill. Every single seed germinated except for one of the moneymakers. However, they were only sown a week ago so it may yet put in an appearance: