Home Growing Strawberries and Cucumbers

Now we have some strawberries in at home, they need a cover - enter the wire mesh:

The wire mesh is interesting to work with - three designs of covers here (bees allowed, birds no). Chose to avoid netting as birds get caught up in it. Also have cucumbers in here growing up the wall - Burpless Tasty and Crystal from the salad kit. These are growing up a construction made from the traditional materials i.e. bamboo canes and string. Weather not great, but the plants all look OK so should be interesting to see how they get on.

Backdated #5: Beans, Courgettes, 19th May

Sowed beans a few weeks back which have been growing steadily, so was time to put them out in #4 bed - usual teepees from 8-foot canes for orient wonder and black turtle:

Purple queen went in to #3 bed after pulling up the sweetcorn which had failed completely:

Also put the courgettes into this bed (with fruit on already) on 24th May:

Backdated #4: Peas, 18th May

Into #2 bed put "Kelvedon Wonder" peas which were started off a little while back:

Covered these as before... hopefully they will not come to fruition at the same time as the petits pois!

Backdated #3: #4 Bed, 13th / 14th May

More raised beds going in, this time slightly less smoothly, and had to make this one 0.5m shorter (i.e. 2.5 x 1.5m) as the new apple tree was in the way. Carefully-and-not-in-any-sense-a-bodge measuring up:

Realisation that the ground has not been cleared in advance, some cursing followed:

End game though was a working raised bed:

Plot overview:

Starting to look cultivated 🙂

Backdated #2: Sweetcorn, 13th May

Into #3 bed we planted sweet corn "Incredible F1" which had been started in a pot at home - the plants were starting to struggle so needed to go out:

Layout was easy - they want to be about 0.45m apart, so just used canes to lay out a grid:

Ended up with a nice regular grid of corn plants:

Which - about a week later - were dead:

So far, over all the years of allotment-ing, this is about a 0% success rate on sweetcorn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Backdated #1: Peas and Shallots, 7th May

Backdated post here - been busy so struggling to keep up with the blog... into bed #2 we've put petits pois (Waverex) in on a teepee - about 40 plants in total, which should keep us in peas for a while.

Next to these we put a couple of rows of shallots - Matador and Zebrune

which we then covered to stop the pigeons from eating the whole lot! Overview of the plot 7th May:

Todays sowings

For the record I sowed:
1 pot of spring onion "White Lisbon" (approx 15-20 seeds)
1 pot of  spring onion "Ishikura" (approx 15-20 seeds)
6 small biodegradable pots of Swede (2 seeds per pot)
6 small biodegradable pots of perpetual spinach (1 seed per pot)
1 pot of Lollo Rosso with fresh seed (the other lot sown on 25th April didn't germinate)
Now the weather is into the 20s during the day the pots will stay outside.
In addition we bought a pumpkin plant (shock, horror!) called "Ghost" that will hopefully be good for carving. The plant is still quite small so will be potted on and grown at home until it is big enough to fend off the slugs at the allotment.

Strawberry taste test (we hope)

A couple of weeks ago we planted some freebie strawberry plants of an unknown variety in raised mounds covered in black plastic:

Despite our best efforts at pinning the plastic down, the wind kept blowing it up causing the plants to disappear underneath! Eventually we gave up and dispensed with the plastic. The plants don't look particularly happy at the moment and one of them has died.
Today when we visited our local garden centre I spotted lots of big healthy strawberry plants and loads of different varieties. Each plant was £2 (so not cheap) but I thought it would be fun to buy a selection that we can taste test, and hopefully have some plantlets that we can grow on for next year. Since I want to make sure these expensive plants are well looked after I have planted them in the garden so I can keep a close eye on them! We treated ourselves to 5 varieties:
Red Gauntlet
Pegasus
Cambridge Favourite
Florence
Elsanta
The one in the foreground of the below pic is Elsanta:

I really hope we get a reasonable crop of strawberries! In other news we made our first harvest from this years sowings.... albeit a very small one:

These are the first of the rainbow radishes from the Psychedelic Salad kit.

Bed finish / prepared for planting

Slight change of plan - cut down the tall posts on the raised beds, with a view to making all of them short (sensible?) - useful as we will be needing more really soon. Filled the second one which was installed the other day with 9 x 50 l bags of compost - after digging over the soil underneath which had got somewhat compacted:



9 bags not an accident - as the bed is 4.5 square metres this should make it around 10 cm deep - we later pressed it down by walking along a board, so the soil level is a little below the top of the wood, but it now looks like a raised bed. Will be planting peas in there tomorrow...