Plant chaos!

Since the weather has been so lovely over the last couple of weeks, we have started to harden off some of the plants:

In this pic there are tomatoes, brassicas, onions and (more) peas.The cayenne chillis have outgrown their 3 inch pots so I transplanted them into much bigger pots and gave them a tomato feed:

All four of these plants have flower buds! Small canes used to stake orchid flowers were used to give the plants some support and were tied in with soft ties. We are keeping 4 out of the 9 plants - the others will be given away. Finally, I spent the morning sitting on the grass pricking out leeks into pots. We have 2 trays of leek seedlings (if you recall a second batch was sown as I was worried that the first lot would not germinate!):

A total of 110 leeks were pricked out into pots which kept me amused for most of the morning! Unfortunately this was only one trays worth so I think I will be giving the rest away.

Easy Peasy

Had a chance to get to the allotment lately so got some pea netting up (by a happy accident had exactly the right amount) and some of our pea plants planted -

We dug a little trench and filled this with shop bought compost, to give the peas some chance of getting established. Other than that generally quiet up at the plot - got some more edging to get installed but currently the ground is like granite as we've had no rain for a few weeks. No sign of any spuds coming through yet, but some of the soft fruit is doing OK:

Black currants on the left, strawberries on the right, black membrane around to keep the weeds down. The frame around the strawberries will have blue tubing and netting added to keep the birds out once some fruit has set. We have raspberries around the place which are starting to come back to life as well, but way too early to have anything to see at the moment. Beginning to worry about lack of space on the plot already!

Spuds II - Revenge of the Estima

Went up to the allotment this afternoon to plant second early (Estima) and main crop (Scarpo Mira and Pink Fir Apple) usual drill - dig trench, place chitted potatoes in, cover and earth up:

You can see the two previous rows of first earlies next to the newly turned soil. Onions also going OK:

And you can see from the shadow that the sun was out - though also windy mind :o) - when I got home also covered our little out-the-front-of-the-house polytunnel with Enviromesh:

This is to grow some salad under, to keep the critters from munching on it before we do. Staple-gun-tastic :o)

Spuds

Two weeks back went to plant the first early potatoes (Lady Christl and Pentland Javelin) - we dug a narrow trench:

Filled the bottom with grass clippings then sat spuds therein:

One row for each variety:

It started to rain while we were doing this but here are the first two rows all earthed up:

And taken a few days later when the sun came out and we were digging the ground for the next two rows:

During which I found a shoe!