Watching/Growing/Planting/Sowing

Wow! What a great week to be on leave! Such a lovely sunny day that even the wind was warm.

Jamie potted up the three peppers, using a sand and potting compost mix. They're in pots on weed suppressant near the tomatoes.

I planted a row of French marigolds between the carrots and parsnips. And put a staggered row of pot marigolds (calendula) alongside the tomatoes.
The salsify is barely visible but they all seem to have germinated. Here's a macro-shot of it - very easy to miss or mistake for grass!

The French beans haven't appeared (well one did) so I sowed some into individual pots and have left them in the greenhouse to germinate. I also sowed a tray of Winter cabbage Tundra in modules which should be fine germinating outside, under netting.

At last we've also sown a root trainer tray of Sweetcorn supersweet which are under the grow light at home.

A little bit of Robbie news - his chicks have fledged. We saw two sitting on the fence and Robbie was feeding them both. One of them did a circuit round our plot, but didn't land. Hopefully I'll get a photo of the family soon.
At one point Robbie was sitting on our bench and was letting out a really high-pitched sound but frozen in position. When we looked about we saw that the kestrel was on the telegraph wires watching. Once the kestrel flew away Robbie started feeding again.
That reminded me to fill in the Kestrel Survey online!

Frosty and Cold

Jamie visited the plot to take some compost up and get a spade, as snow (and lots of it) has been forecast for tomorrow. The forecasters may be right - it's snowing as I type this.

It was a bit frosty and cold. The minimum temperature had been -5° with a maximum of 4°. The compost was frozen - hopefully the worms were snuggled in the warm centre but the slugs weren't!

All the while he was there he was being watched by a kestrel - a very fluffy kestrel. Apologies for shakey pic but Jamie was chilly :-)

 

Planes, plans and potatoes

We spent a few hours working on the plot this afternoon, it actually got pretty warm. There were lots of fellow plot-holders on site today too so there were plenty of reasons for breaks :-)
We had our own air show while we were on the site. Didn't get any photos but it was great to see the red arrows, 2 spitfires and a hercules. It seems they were flying back from an airshow near Cambridge.

Jamie finished digging out the grass on Plot8. We've decided that we'll put our strawberry bed in there, near the rhubarb - straight across where we were going to move the seating. So the bench can (probably) stay where it is - unless we definitely get another (at least) 4 years on the site in which case I want a pond and then the bench will need to be near that - but that can be decided on next year...

Anyway, where was I? So, the strawberries... we only want 8 plants as we know Geoff's did brilliantly this year and grew big bushy plants which will fill the space we've planned for them. I potted 8 of Geoff's runners - they're still attached to his plants and secured with wire until they've rooted.

We're going to plant them like Geoff's done - on that weed suppressant that you can see in the picture above.

I cut off the tops of the original broad bean plants which have succombed badly to chocolate spot - we leave the roots in the ground to add nutrients to the soil - mainly nitrogen. There's also a chance that we may get a further crop from them, but it's a bit late now really.
We got a whole bagful of dead-heads from the calendula! And riddled a bagful of lovely compost from our green bin which is now half-full of all the broad bean tops - we'll add some cardboard to that tomorrow.

Jamie found these two snails mating. Didn't have the heart to split them up but sent them to do their love-making elsewhere!
We pulled some potatoes, one of each plant:

• Orla - top left. This was one of the few Orla plants which actually survived this year. Disappointing though as there were only 3 reasonable tubers.
• Kestrel - top right. This had quite a few tubers, including a giant but one of the tubers had either slug damage or blight on it. A couple have deep ridges where they've grown against stones, but the potato should be alright for cooking.
• Chopin - bottom. Produced 7 even-sized tubers. The chopins have definitely been my favourites this year. There are a few small holes in some of them but generally they come out of the ground looking lovely and smooth with few blemishes.

We also got some more french beans and the last few broad beans from the original plants - not sure if they'll be edible.

Potato (and slug) time

Had a lovely couple of hours on the plot today. We'd been expecting rain but still haven't needed to use our new brolly!!
We pottered around a bit. Jamie DID finish the digging on the new plot and fed the tomatoes, runner beans and peas with Growmore.  I earthed up the celeriac, some of them are bulbing up pretty well.


Celeriac

I took a few photos and pulled some potatoes; one Chopin plant and one Kestrel - both giving pretty good harvests of nice looking tubers (we forgot to weigh them before we'd cooked them) but there are a few holes.

Geophilus carpophagus

We did wonder whether this centipede had made the holes but it seems that it's slugs. (The centipede eats baby earthworms though, so isn't a particularly welcome guest.)

Slug hole

We weren't too concerned by these holes - they don't look too offensive and don't seem to be too deep, but when we cut into the spud it's a different story...


The inside story

Ugh, not nice.
NOTE TO US: Do not bake potatoes with small holes in them!!
Jamie's already talking about buying nematodes next year, though the problem is most likely because of the awful rain. The slugs that do this type of damage are Keel slugs - not the giants you see when you move anything outside at the moment, but fairly small ones (<6cm) which live under the ground.

Anyway, the potatoes tasted nice, just needed a few extra bits cut off! We also had lovely runner beans and the cucumber is for lunch - also great for a little snack whilst on the plot :-)

Sunshine and Showers

We had a nice couple of hours on the plot this morning - pretty warm and sunny but the wind was rather strong. Everything had grown a lot over the last 3 days! The sweet peas are looking very pretty and there are some runner beans growing long!

We pulled some potatoes:
The kestrel plant looked a bit sickly and clearly wasn't happy. We got 3 reasonably sized tubers (400g) from it, but the blight had got down into one of the tubers  :-(
The Chopin plant was the one that I had pilfered from before, but still got two lovely big healthy looking tubers (500g).
The Red Duke of York plant wasn't very happy looking but produced a fine harvest of lovely red spuds (1.3kg). It's been such a wet year, the tubers were caked in hard mud. It's hard to learn much about the different varieties this year, but Chopin really do seem to have been particularly successful... (hope I haven't spoken too soon!)

There are 4 Courgettes in the plant-uh-oh it's started :-) A couple of the sweetcorn have the male flower developing - the plants are very short though.

The kohl rabi has germinated and more of the broad beans needed cloching. I also had to cloche some parsley which I planted out last week - something has been nibbling it. We saw a tiny little froglet hopping about so hopefully he'll stay near our plot - he was smaller than the one we saw previously (only about 3cm big - aw!)

Took the netting off the parsnips as they were getting rather cramped.

We did some weeding, dead-heading and turned the compost before having to dash off because the light pitter-patter of rain turned into a torrential downpour. And look at the crowd we found in the communal shed!  :-)

Tony, Gill, Geoff and Kerry, with Jane & Derek hidden

Not so blue but still hot

Yes, today was a little cooler with cloudy skies much of the time, but it still got incredibly hot when doing anything other than sitting! I dug over the patch where we'd taken the shallots and decided not to take on any of Plot 8 (though of course Jamie did some before flaking out).

I did some weeding - all around the onions, which are Santero F1. They're downy mildew resistant and have proved to be worthy of the title as they're looking good compared to a lot of other onions on site (including some of our salad onions).

Also weeded inside the mesh cloche where we planted a row of turnips and a row of radish - the turnips were devoured by pollen beetles and slugs but the radishes got away with it. Some are big and VERY pepper - I have some salad lunches planned for next week.

Our little cucumber won't quite be ready for that but it's getting there!

Jamie cut the haulms off all the Chopin potatoes because blight has got to them - probably due to all the slug damage.
Here are some pics of some of the other potatoes which are flowering at the moment - they're very pretty.

Kestrel flowers	Congo flowers

And finally, we saw this busy little bee on our calendula - shame he wasn't on our beans, but still good to see on the plot!

Eventually got to the allotment

We managed to get to the plot before the cold rain started today.
Not much happening, only a couple of other people were there.

Since our last visit the minimum temperature had been -5° I've had to scrape frost from the car a few times in the last week - brrr. Good for the sprouts though!

We picked enough to for two meals. They look really good; some are huge. The enviromesh did its job stopping most pests before they did too much damage.

Picked some lovely carrots too and pulled the last potatoes (Kestrels). They had started growing but look ok, although there weren't as many as we'd hoped - we ended up having to buy some from Tescos to have enough for the two days (which is always disappointing!).

The carrots split whilst being peeled/cut. This happens quite a lot - probably because they'd been left in the ground too long. They should have been Arctic King so shouldn't mind the cold weather... Anyway, they tasted lovely. As did the sprouts, even the biggest ones and no damage beyond the outer leaves - excellent! Now we know they'll be good for Christmas dinner.