Showing posts with label blackfly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blackfly. Show all posts

Monday 3 June 2019

Strawberry Swing

I've had a few days off work to celebrate Jamie's birthday. We've had a little rain and some sunshine. It's been good gardening weather for the last couple of days.
The Love in the Mist (Nigella) has burst into bloom - such elaborate flowers and they're everywhere. So beautiful.
Unfortunately most of the poppies and Californian poppies have taken over a section of Plot7 where I need to grow veg, so I'm digging them up - it feels so wrong. Most of these will be going into the green bin at home, though I'm sure they'll be back as they self-seed everywhere.
I've attempted to pot on some of them, but I'm not sure they'll work - well, at least they stand some chance...
We've planted out our Benchmaster Runner Beans, it's so windy at the moment that we've protected them with a fleece wall.
The Pickwick Dwarf Runners are also planted out and protected under fleece for tonight (not because we think a frost is coming, but it's their first time out of the polytunnel). I need to put something up so that they don't get snapped by the wind too - we've never grown dwarf runners, but we know that the dwarf french beans are easily snapped.
We've sowed our courgettes into pots to germinate at home along with the Yard Long Beans. So far, 4 of the 9 Gigantes beans have germinated - I hope to get a few more than that to plant up against the canes along with the Yard Longs.
The birds have been pinching our strawberries as soon as they go vaguely pink, so Jamie has netted them up.
But in the meantime Ivan has given us a lovely punnet of strawberries today and they're going home along with our first broad beans - these are from our over-wintered ones, which survived being squashed by snow surprisingly well. Thank goodnesss - we didn't get any broad beans last year and they really are one of our favourite home-grown harvests.
Blackfly are beginning to be a problem, so Jamie has sprayed some of the plants and you can see in some of these photos that slug pellets have also made an appearance - we protect the other wildlife from these by netting any pelleted areas.We don't want any of the robins, magpies, crow, greenfinch or the frogs to eat anything dodgy.
Our shallots are still producing flowers, which get plucked off every time we spot them - annoying. I don't remember having this problem before.
Liz gave me a Lovage plant. It's a herb and apparently it grows huge (over 6-foot) and every part of the plant can be used as a celery substitute - sounds good!
So, things are progressing quite nicely. Just a bit more rain required (night-time only please!) and a couple more days off to hopefully get a bit more clearing done....
The song title by Coldplay is, obviously because of the strawberries - we hope to eat a few of our own quite soon, otherwise well, there's always rhubarb!!

Tuesday 26 June 2018

Celebration

Oh yes! Sunday evening was a time to celebrate - England scoring six goals in a World Cup match! OK, so it was Panama and they got one back, but really, it was very exciting. So we went crazy and celebrated on the allotment....
Hahaha, well, we hadn't prepared for a BBQ! But it was a beautiful hot evening to sit and watch the moon rise and the sun sink.
I picked the first of the broad beans - had them in a delicious salad for my lunch.
The plants are being destroyed by blackfly, so we're going to pull the most damaged ones, but I want to harvest a few more beans off them first.
The blackfly seem to halt the growth of the beans, but if they don't get onto the pods until they've grown a bit they don't generally affect the bean - however, they're disgusting to pick!
So, now it's time to singalong with Kool & The Gang.