Planting! And Sunshine!

The sun shone for much of the day and by lunchtime the wind had ceased so we were safe to do quite a lot of planting, including this row of  Russian Giant sunflowers along the back of Plot 7. There are 7 plants which range in height from about 20 - 50cm at the moment.

Plots 7 and 3 have each gained Defender courgettes, with pots which may make it easier to water once the plants get big. They're planted on top of a hole filled with manure, for moisture retention and nourishment.

Plot 3 has the first of its Jack of All Trades pumpkins, plus a Curry plant (herb) which we bought yesterday. It really does smell of curry and you can apparently add it to vegetables and rice for flavouring. It's very pretty with silver leaves and it gets yellow flowers which can also be used in cooking.

Curry Plant

This pumpkin plant has rather a long stem and given that it's been such a windy year we're protecting it for a while with a netted cloche. Hopefully it will soon be big and strong enough to not need the protection.

We planted out the two grafted Lizzano tomato plants - they're happy outside in pots but the pots need to be tall as they trail and get huge (at least they have over the last couple of years). The top pot has the bottom cut out of it, so the plant has all that soil (plus manure) to grow roots into.

Lizzano Tomato

Jamie's sown the Rocky cucumbers, at home, for planting out later. We're hoping they'll grow up a trellis.
I planted some asparagus pea plants on Plot 3 and transplanted some spare lettuce seedlings that haven't really got a home - better to put them in Plot 3 than compost them...

Asparagus seedling

We found this little nettle weevil in my hair when I got home! Cute!

Bye!

We have some colour - Blue Sky!

And it was so lovely to be out in the sunshine!

Jamie wheeled a few more barrow-loads of manure down to our site from the HAHA winter delivery, the pile is rather small now, but it's good stuff - very well-rotted so it's a shame to not use it.

I got an additional barrow-load, just to show willling and to make the cost up to £2. It was tiring, even on a cold day! We really should have taken our flask with us. It was nice recuperating with the sun on my face though!

I did some more weeding, clearing the area where we had wildflowers last year. I wasn't sure whether the rosettes were from flowers or weeds but I weeded them all as we may not have the flowers there this year. I still need to do a bit more planning for that half of plot 8, we're waiting for a blueberry to be delivered which is likely to go there, near the raspberry canes (which were rubbish last year). There's also our massive sage plant which keeps spreading and I haven't used sage for about 2 years! I need to look up what to do with it; cooking but also probably to get rid of most of it and put a few plants in pots for sharing.
Look, tiny signs of edible life...

A garlic sprout!

Rhubarb, at last!

And, here's the surprising little songster who was serenading us today - a little dunnock!

Composting & Harvesting

A warm reasonably sunny afternoon gave us time to deal with our compost.

Purple-podded mangetout with such pretty flowers

We're moving their position back to where they were year 1 - they hopefully won't mind the hedge/tree roots as much as some of the vegetables do.
The black Dalek bin has been warmly composting all the old cuttings, cardboard and kitchen waste (and a bit of manure) for over a year - close to 18 months.

Straight from the compost bin

Lots of lovely clean, pink little worms, wood lice, millipedes and beetles (mostly devil's coach horses) have been doing a good job breaking down all that organic matter. We roughly riddled it all - through an old fire guard topped with chicken wire - and bagged up the resultant compost.

The end result after riddling

Mmm, so good to feel with your fingertips! We're storing it in the empty bin to keep it nice and warm before we make our new (additional) strawberry bed with these potted-on runners.

Runners still attached to the mother plants

The remaining woody bits, cardboard and eggshells (which we're amazed remained un-rotted) were returned to the other compost bin as brown waste.

Before going home I picked a load of Zephyr squashes and some other veggies for a few meals, plus a few for work colleagues. There's parcel in there too - lovely celery tasting parsley-type herb to add to some potato salad lunches this week.

The mangetout and asparagus peas are so delicious fried in butter!

Patty pans a-plenty!

Festival Squashes

As you can see, the patty pan are going a bit crazy and some Festival squash seem like they may actually come to something - especially if the weather warms up, as forecast. I hate to say it, but we could really do with a few drops of rain! We keep having to water our toms. I've ordered some jar lids so I'll soon be making tomato chutney - hooray!

Something Achieved

At last! I made the chive vinegar that I've been thinking about since last August when I saw it made on The Horticultural Channel.

The first jar I made up with white wine vinegar, using the chives which I picked last week and whose buds had opened in water at home. The colour had already started seeping into the water at this point and the flowers weren't so vibrant as the freshly picked ones.

Later, after a visit to the plot, I made another jar using some lovely fresh, and more richly coloured, chives and normal distilled white vinegar.

We also had some delicious stewed rhubarb, plucked from the plot today.

Lovely colourful ingredients to work with!

Try to ignore the doughnuts!!

Springing into Action

At last! We've started! And the birds know it too - the site was alive with bird-song and plotholders again!
Last week Jamie cleared and raked over the Brussels patch, after adding fertilizer and lime - we're putting the sprouts in there again this year. There aren't any pests and diseases there (that we're aware of) so they'll hopefully be ok.

And today the sun shone and the temperature rose so we had a busy day with two visits to the plot. Jamie cleared and dug the area on Plot 8 where the onions are going. Jamie wants to add a bit of chicken manure (because the onion fertilizer hasn't been delivered) to the ground and we're expecting the Santero onions to be delivered in the next few days. We're giving parts of Plot 7 a bit of a rest this year so spuds and onions are out of the usual rotation plan.

I mixed the compost bins. We've seen mouse action in one of the bins over Winter but I didn't come across any in there today. I managed to combine the contents of both bins into one and add a lot of 'brown' waste, that was the remains of the wildflower patch. There's a good mix of wet, dry, green, brown compostible waste which will stay in the green bin for a year now, but we need to keep stirring it regularly.
The worms have had a good winter in the black bin - lots of lovely shiny new pink worms in there! Yes, I do see that slug in there too!

I started clearing the raised bed. It's full of tiny thyme plants which self-seeded. I planted a few up and also a few cuttings from the rosemary and sage. Not sure if they'll work but we'll see - of course, I should have looked up what to do before I did it, but, well, you know how it is!

So another sunny day tomorrow for more clearing, tidying but no sowing yet...be patient...

 

Waiting for Rain and getting some!

We went up in the afternoon yesterday in the hope that we'd get caught in a rainstorm, we watched it moving towards up, getting darker and the wind started up but we only felt a few drops. As we got home the heavens opened and we got a lot of rain overnight and this morning. 11mm in total

The plots look so happy after rain and the weeds appreciate it even more! Above is some of the Asparagus Pea which are very pretty (but don't need a trellis).
Below is one of the Uchiki Kuri squash plants - I'm going to need to cut back some off-shoots. It would happily cover 4 poles I think!

We're a bit concerned about one of our Brussel Sprouts plants - it's leaves are going rather curly. We'll keep an eye on it but may need to pull it up in an attempt to prevent any cross-infection.

I'm also unsure of what to do with my Florence (bulb) fennel. After all the panic as the slugs were munching their way through it earlier in the year, it's come on really well. However, how big are they meant to get before eating? I wanted to keep them for soup but they look like they're mature now.

This is the biggest one - as big as my palm and quite pump. Is it ok to leave it to carry on growing?

 

This is my herb fennel. It's really tall and has flowered. The flying insects really love it, so I'm leaving it to grow as it's not really something I will use much for cooking and it looks very pretty.

The runner beans are also looking beautiful with masses of flowers. There are a few beans forming but not sure whether they'll be ready to win 'longest runner bean' this year (or even come second as we did last year...)

Just as it began to rain again this afternoon, we left the plot with a lovely selection of veggies which will cover us for a few meals.

International Kidney potatoes on the left and Orla on the right. You can tell the Orla as the slugs love them :-(

Sunshine & Buttercups

Another lovely day so another few hours on the plot. I have to admit, most of the time I wasn't actually working; I got some good wildlife pics though. We saw a toad and a couple of ladybirds - we haven't seen many of them this year so far. Pictures will be put on the wildlife blog later.
This buttercup is one of the many on the empty plot next door to ours. They're so beautiful when the sun shines on them. Jamie got fed up with the edge of the path looking so awful so tidied it up and that's where he found the toad.

We're just waiting for the chives to burst into colour. We've seen a few more bees and hoverflies around over the last couple of days so the flowers will keep them happy.

I sowed five more jack-be-little pumpkin seeds. Only one germinated under the light at home and that looks rather leggy. We'd like to have two plants really.
We also transplanted the french marigolds into modules - 96 of them; I think a few of them will be re-homed!

The weather forecast is threatening 2° tonight so we earthed up the potatoes again (just to be on the safe side) and where we couldn't fit any more earth we put grass cuttings on them. The thermometer showed it got down to 3° last night but nothing had been frosted. Maybe the wind helped or it may be that the ground is warm enough now...

 

Sage for soup

We braved the persistent wind and rain to visit the plot today.


We only needed to pick a handful of sage leaves and drop off some kitchen waste for the compost bin. I used my new pot (thanks Carolyn!), ingeniously made from a plastic drinks bottle, to hold the sage leaves.

The sage is to be joined by the remainder of the chestnuts for soup a la Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's Veg Everyday book - another Christmas pressie (thanks James!).

The sprout cage had done its usual trick and was at a jaunty angle, so we re-secured it but its on it's last legs. It's been useful but it's just not strong and sturdy enough; the home-made cages made from the blue water pipe are more resilient.

Over-wintering broad beans

Last night we baked one of the Cornells Bush Delicata squash - well worth growing. Jamie thought it similar to sweet potato and I've today found a reference to it as 'sweet potato squash'. It really was delicious, with butter and pepper on it - ooh, I'm drooling at the memory...

We pickled two jars of beetroot last night - again in red wine vinegar, with thinner slices. The lightest of the beets was yellow once it was cooked! It tasted incredibly sweet. I think they were all boltardy beets but there may have been a couple of moneta in there too, though they were all meant to be red ones!



A rather bleak-looking plot!

We went to the plot this afternoon - it was rainy and rather chilly. It was just a quick visit to sow the Aqua Dulce broad beans for over-wintering. We've covered them with the onion netting - hopefully that will protect them from mice and the worst of the weather (we're holding Kerry to this!). We've only sown 17 seeds - leftovers from last year.

It got to 0° last night... The chives have gone down and the marjoram went black a couple of weeks ago(!) but the hardier herbs (rosemary, thyme and fennel) are ok and even the parsley is hanging on to life for the time-being.

Plot 8 still looks quite colourful in this photo, but the calendula are just about dying back.

And this side of Plot 7 only has sprouts to show off!