What a beautiful day

The sun was shining at the allotment today:

Astonishing to think that it was snowing yesterday! We managed to get the cabbages in:

My daughter made me some white collars for them out of a builders bag:

We covered them in Enviromesh to keep out the cabbage whites:

We were also liberal with the slug pellets after some of our cabbages were badly damaged last year. Whilst Graeme was doing some more digging/ soil improving, I sowed a row of parsnips and a row of radishes/lollo rosso lettuces next to the row of beetroot and red onions. For the parsnips I dug a little trench, filled it up with sand, sowed the seeds and lightly covered with compost:

We left the canes along the ground to indicate where the rows are. The bit between the compost bin and the cabbages was dug over by Graeme and improved with lots of manure:

The manure heap is only a fraction of its former self now:

The blackcurrants are showing signs of life and have little flower buds:

The rhubarb is nearly ready for picking too.

At home the chillis are doing great:

The pot on the right is Cherry Bomb and the pot on the left is Ring of Fire. These have now been given individual pots and are kept indoors at the moment. However there is the promise of a greenhouse soon as our slabs are going down next weekend!

Sowing more stuff

Today I sowed some of the tender veg. These included:
Runner bean: "White Emergo"
French bean: "Blue Lake"
Pumpkin: "Jack O' Lantern"
Courgette: "Dundoo"

The beans were sown into modules and placed in our plastic greenhouse. I sowed 8 seeds of each. The courgette and pumpkin seeds were sown into 5 inch pots to be placed
. I put 4 of each seed in a pot. The courgette seeds are an F1 hybrid and claimed to have on average 5 seeds per packet. I got lucky and had 13 in mine!
In other news, many of the flower seeds sown the other week are beginning to germinate. The golden acre cabbages in the plastic greenhouse are doing particularly well (sown 7th Feb) so I have brought them out to begin hardening them off:

There are 13 plants in total. The cauliflowers sown on the same day are half the size and look rather unhappy!

The mother of all tomato plants...

Do you think we started our tomatoes off too early?!

These are "Chadwick" and are doing very nicely! They are now residing in slightly larger pots. The other variety we are growing, "Garden Pearl" are not quite as tall as Chadwick (presumably because they are a bush variety) have flower buds! I also potted up some "Sugardrop" seedlings given to me by my dad; a cherry variety grown from seeds saved from a supermarket tomato. I have no idea where we are going to put them all!

Pots 2: Charlotte

A week has passed and we had some time to get the charlotte potatoes in - these are not very chitted (6/31 spuds) but hey:

but we decided to get them in the ground anyway. One row alongside the estima which went in last week then three rows of 7 like this in this patch:


Ground turned out to be heavier than I remember... anyway end result:


Just to prove there is some green on the site somewhere:

Our black currants are starting to grow... and some strawberries. No signs of life yet from the apple...

In other news: spring onions have started to germinate, possible sighting of a beetroot seedling, Japanese onions doing well, set onions (sturon) have started to sprout, rhubarb growing well - seems like the plot is starting to come back to life...

Pot planting

It's easter, so it is time to get the potatoes in. The estima potatoes were further along so we decided to get them in first - three rows of 10. The soil where we planted them was already dug over and improved so it was just a matter of digging the trenches:

"Just a matter" - it was still hard work! No doubting the local geology! Anyhow, spuds get planted:

10 happy looking seed spuds. Tried earthing up a little:

But this kinda got lost when the next trench was dug, so will need to earth up as they grow. Repeat two more times until:

I did the digging, Helen and Emily the planting and some weeding around the blackcurrants:

Was lovely day, got some rain later on so the spuds should have had a good start... Next instalment: the Charlottes...

Flowers!

As well as cultivating/sowing stuff at the allotment we also need to do something about our back garden:

The above pic is a panorama so gives a warped view of the space (the path from the gate to the back door is actually straight not curved!). The garden is about 15 metres square (approx 50 feet square in old money). We have recently moved into this property so the back garden is essentially a 'blank canvas' apart from a hornbeam which is where the stake is to the right of the plastic greenhouse. In the first instance we are planning to extend the patio, lay some slabs for a greenhouse (where the plastic one is currently residing), turf the garden leaving a six foot section along the brick wall for planting a herbaceous border. We have been in the property since Christmas and already the garden is smothered in weeds. Today we started to round-up in preparation for turf (tba). The ground is heavy clay and will need a lot of sharp sand. Since now is a good time to sow seeds for a flower border I raided my seed collection and sowed the following in the plastic greenhouse:

I am hoping to raise as many plants as possible from seed as this is by far the cheapest and most economical way of filling a large border. I could'nt resist buying a dahlia tuber though - I have a bit of a soft spot for these!