An Aide-Memoire

Mostly as a record for us, but the weather was dramatic when I picked Jamie up from the plot this evening, so there are a few photos. Jamie has potted on 44 marigold seedlings and they're outside under netting.

The pumpkins all sprouted (the day after I wrote the last post) and the luffah popped up the following day and have been moved up to the greenhouse. Jamie sowed minicole cabbage.

The Benchmaster beans are about 15cm tall so should also go out soon. The mangetout have been planted out with plastic bottle cloches to protect them from pigeons until they're established.

The broad beans have flowers on! Hooray! 

I've sowed a row of Radish Maribeau and the chilli plant (Prairie Fire) for my office has been delivered. Oh, and we put the next stage of the nematodes into the raised bed, potato bags, potato row and fennel tubs yesterday before the rain started. Perfect timing!

Nematode Time

It's that time again, preparing the way for a slug free Summer - yeah, right! Well, we do what we can and we use Nemaslug. It's been reasonably successful over the last couple of years and has mostly gone in the patch where our potatoes will be going on Plot3. The ground is very wet on that plot - we're a bit concerned that our spuds will rot before they get a chance to grow. The area is covered with plastic at the moment so, even though it's going to be a rainy week, hopefully the ground won't get any wetter... (hmm, not sure it really works that way, but...)

This is the raised bed for salad and florence fennel. We watered in the nematodes and then watered some more, to help wash them further into the soil, and then covered the bed in black plastic. That should warm the earth up nicely and protect the nematodes from the sunlight.

And there's our beetroot - just peeping through! Only a few seeds have germinated so far, but (touch wood) I've never known beetroot to fail. If it does I'll sow some more; it's pretty fast growing.

We copied fellow plotholder, Vic's idea of putting pots in between the strawberry plants for watering. The plants get so bushy that we find the water (and plant food) often just runs down the outside of the weed suppressant. Each of our strawberry plants got a dose of GrowMore yesterday and a dose of nematodes today - what could be worse than sluggy strawberries?!

That's the plot that I weeded yesterday. The earth looks nice and dark because I've spread the remains of last year's grow bags and potato bags to the area. It hasn't been dug in yet as there are liable to be quite a few weeds and baby tomato plants growing in there before we're ready to plant.

Look at that healthy looking broad bean seedling. We've sowed 24 and we're just waiting for 3 slow ones to break through the surface now. When they're a little bigger we'll plant them out.

This is what we're waiting for now - lovely rhubarb. Nearly there, those stems just need to grow a bit more - a couple of weeks I reckon...

Hmmm, 400th Post...

 

It's a milestone, so allow me a little time to reminisce...
Our lovely Marsh Lane site opened in April 2009 and I wanted to record our allotment progress. I much prefer electronic records for ease of searching so posted updates on our personal website - but after 2-and-a-bit years I found it too annoying to update and needed an alternative and discovered blogging!

Day 1 of the site

I opted for Blogger, can't remember why, but it's free and offered Picasa for photo storage so suits my needs. My first post was on 12th June 2011 - what a dull post that was...Not even one photo!
Moving swiftly on...

Blogger offers stats, I'm not sure how accurate they are because of robots but I find it quite interesting. These are apparently my top 3 posts ...

1. Fungus Gnats! Well, I'm assuming the title is an oft-searched phrase (523 hits!), not all that catchy or interesting though to be honest.
2. Salad, Garlic and Compost. That wasn't a recipe suggestion! It has a nice photo, so maybe that's why it got 184 hits.
3. French Bean Chutney. Well, that is a recipe and a lovely one so I can see the appeal there for 158 visits.

Well, that's enough of that, back to today...
It was a very windy day, with quite a lot of rain. It wasn't a day for spending much time at the allotment but we did what we intended to do, we got this year's nematodes on the go.

Now, as you know, we don't like killing things, but these slugs are taking liberties! So, nemaslugs strike again - in our potato plot, our carrot plot and in the raised bed where my fennel and salad are going.

(as long as you don't consider slugs as wildlife...)

They needed to be well watered in and they got that! The ground temperature needs to stay above 5° otherwise the nematodes will die so hopefully this is timed right  - not that they'd keep in the fridge any longer anyway.

And now it's British Summer Time! 
Hooray, lighter evenings so we can go to the plot after work!