Growing Time

After waiting for the forecast extreme heat then a big thunderstorm, which never arrived, we had a grey day on the plot yesterday and just 1.5mm of rain. But, hooray! We got some blue sky and warm sunshine today so the site was nice and busy.

Kestrel potato flower

Some plotholders have pulled some early potatoes already, but we probably have a couple more weeks to wait. The Tenerife potatoes look happier in the potato bags than they do in the ground, but they're beginning to get some flowers so hopefully they're healthy enough to grow some tubers.

Jamie got a couple more pumpkins planted up in Plot3; adding lots of manure to the hole to feed the pumpkins and cheer up the earth on the plot at the same time. The earth on this plot is reddish in colour; very different from Plots 7&8 which were used for the canal clean-up in the 1980s. We think that the dredgings made the ground very fertile. I planted a row of marigolds along the edge of Plot3 which we hope will encourage bees and other insects to the plot too.

That's a photo of our lovely home-made compost. Amazing to think that consists of just gardening/kitchen waste and ripped up cardboard boxes! We used that, along with some well-rotted manure for our celery seedlings. They are planted in tubs in the hope we can keep it wet enough. We'll see. Last time we tried to grow celery the stems we're hollow...

The beetroot and Silverskin onions are growing well. Most of the garlic looks okay, but some are developing flower heads, so we'll use them early. We had one tonight - not very well developed cloves but very strong flavour!

My boss at work gave us two tomato plants (I need to check the variety- I know they're yellow cherry fruits). They're planted up in a GrowBag in the greenhouse, with string going from the pots to the roof. Exciting! We've never grown toms inside before.

We're unfortunately sharing our strawberries with the ants, but they're still delicious and there's plenty to go round :-)