Nice weather for snails (again)

A very quick visit to the plot this afternoon - we just wanted to check that our cloches had stayed on and the little sweetcorn plants were still upright (they are). It's cold (about 15°) and rainy.

All we saw, in the way of wildlife, was a few birds - one pigeon which we freed from a plot holder's netted cloche - and these snails.

Both these were on the thyme flowers

Pretty - brown lipped banded snail

Tidying and weeding

After a too long walk yesterday I didn't have the energy to do much on the allotment today. Did a bit of tidying this afternoon and sat around while the sun shone.

The peppers look a bit more at home on the plot now

The rainfall yesterday has really made the site look happier, but the weeds have gone crazy on the overgrown plots! We weeded throughout the onions and shallots and have given the onions a new mesh cloche so that they're not touching the top - apparently they'll stop growing if they bend over and they've a long way to go yet (leek moth and downy mildew permitting..)

We planted out our 11 little sweetcorn plants. Protected with bottle cloches because they're only small. And Jamie sowed some Early Nantes 5 carrot seed so hopefully more of this sowing will germinate...

Earlibird sweetcorn

Jubilee digging!

There were quite a few of us on the allotment this afternoon - we could hear music from the Hungerford jubilee celebrations in the background. It was pretty hot but very little sunshine.
We cleared another area on the new plot - we were going to have a bbq but weather wasn't nice enough for us.
Jamie earthed up the rest of the potatoes - definitely only two of the Orlas are doing anything which is a shame but not too bad as long as the rest give us plenty of tubers!

I sowed some petit pois (Peewee 65).
Our little robin is getting very cocky - he comes within a couple of feet from us now. He takes some food away but mostly seems to be eating it himself!

Beans, beans, beans!

Had another fab day on the plot today.

Jamie's dark side :-)

A lot of sitting in the sun chatting but also got some weeding and sowing done: 2 rows of Speedy dwarf French beans and 2 rows of Express broad beans - covered with plastic cloches for a bit of protect.

Legume quarter

We dug over the area for the sweetcorn; 11 of 12 have germinated. And Jamie earthed up some of the potatoes, including the 5 purple congos which were accidentally left in from last year.

Cinnabar Moth

Managed to snap this lovely cinnabar moth and the brilliant forum members from Wild About Britain pointed me to this website to identify this yellow fly... I think Trypeta Zoe is correct based on the wing pattern. There were several hanging round our radishes - which, by the way, are going to seed :-(

(male) Trypeta Zoe

What annual leave is for

Of course, we spent most of the day on the allotment. We had it to ourselves much of the time - it wasn't sunny but still pretty warm.
I planted out the celeriac (14 plants) on the new plot - half are under a green cloche and the others are just protected from birds. We need to keep them well-watered.

Celeriac

The mange tout have flowered already and are growing much better than the sweet peas - I think a little Growmore may be needed for them!

Mange Tout flowers

What happens to parsnips if you don't pull them up! (Not our plot!!)

We bought some pots and filled them with Grow bags and some John Innes young plant compost for the peppers - they should tumble over the sides, but the pots look a bit lonely at the moment...

We've started to see ladybird larvae and soldier beetles on the plot now, also lots of bees as there are quite a few flowers around for them now.


Silver Y moth

I found this moth on our netting.The moth takes nectar from flowers, but of course the caterpillars enjoys tucking into brassica and garden peas(!) as well as nettles - well, hopefully this ones babies will stick to nettles... ho hum...

Watering, watering

Another lovely hot and sunny day meant that we needed to water again this evening. We watered everything but are taking care to avoid leaves particularly on the onions which suffered so badly from downy mildew last year.

The cabbage have settled in really well and I'm sure they've grown a few centimetres already! Plenty of water for the broad beans which are covered in flowers and bees, ants and bugs are doing their best to pollinate so we get some lovely beans!

I chopped the parsley down to ground level, hoping it will recover quite soon... The chives are covered in lovely purple flowers but I'll need to chop that down soon too so that we get some fresh growth to use. The par cel seeds have germinated.

Jamie sowed our Earlibird sweetcorn in the bedroom propagator - they should germinate pretty quickly and we'll get them in the ground as soon as possible. We only want 9 plants so out of 12 seeds we hope we'll be ok...
The turnip leaves are being eaten away by flea beetles (probably) but hopefully the turnips will still grow and the beets are getting quite big but no bulbing up yet - I'm getting impatient!!

Comparing this year to last year

Just a couple of quick visits to the plot over the last couple of days. It's been soooo hot we couldn't have done much anyway but everything needed watering. It doesn't take long to dry the top few inches of earth but it's still damp low down where the roots are.


Stitch of Plot 7

The fennel and coriander seeds have germinated and the most recent spring onions have appeared now. The latest carrots have been as poor as the earlier sowing, with only about 3 seeds germinated so far - don't think I'm going to get much carrot soup this year :-( But (touch wood) the parsnips are looking good.

I feel that the year's running away from us a bit. We planned to go a bit slower and probably everything will catch up but with this type of weather it makes me panic thinking plants should be a bit further ahead than they are. I thought the plot isn't looking as alive as it did this time last year but now  I see the photo (see below) it's pretty similar....

Our plot at this time last year

It's just that the potatoes are a couple of weeks slower so aren't looking so good and the covering over the onions and shallots makes me forget they're there (which explains why there were so many weeds in there yesterday!).

Summer's here!

Jamie went to the plot in the early afternoon. Did some more digging of the new plot but nearly killed himself in the process - well, it was about 25°! I joined him after work but mostly sat in the sunshine and watered a bit later in the evening. Incredible weather! The little greenhouse reached 45° - we took the plants out and left them under mesh overnight. Sunshine should reduce the number of slugs round the place.

Geoff kindly gave us some of his spare mange tout plants so they're planted the other side of the mesh from the sweet peas. I've protected them with mesh as pigeons love them.
I only took 10 plants; Jamie doesn't like mange tout so they'll be something else for my lunchbox - I think I may need more than an empty ice-cream tub by the amount of veg I'm going to have to eat!!

Mange Tout

Our Lizzano F1 tomato plug plants arrived from Dobies - they're supposedly blight resistant and are tumblers so we'll need to put them in a biggish pot so they don't just tumble on the ground and go rotten.

The coriander seeds have just sprouted and I've put chicken wire over the turnips as the pigeons are rather partial to those little seedlings too - forgot they enjoyed them last year!

More digging

We finished what we wanted to do today and now we're broken! We dug in a peat-based bag of compost from B&Q to aid water retention for the celeriac. Jamie says we should dig to "a spade and a half depth"; well, if he does a spade then I think I do the half! It's so tiring but worth it for the end result.

We added some Epsom Salts (for magnesium enrichment) to the shallots which are looking a bit yellowy. We added some Growmore general feed to them yesterday to give them a helping hand.

Jamie planted out the 3 Speedy dwarf french beans which grew in the pots - none of the other beans germinated but we'll be planting some more in a few weeks.

We moved our Leonaris, one of our peppers and the one Rocky cucumber which has emerged up to the plot - they'll stay in the cloche for a bit to harden off. We put them on top of some EcoCharlie slug deterrent.

Here are some of the weeds (or wildflowers if they were growing somewhere else!) we are contending with...

Forget-Me-Not

Groundsel

Dead Nettle

Not sure what this is but it grows in abundence
on any uncultivated plot

Ow - digging's painful!!

Jamie dug a bit of the new plot during the week and that's what we were doing for a few hours today - really forget how painful digging is!! We're concentrating on digging an area where we'll plant the celeriac.

Angle Shades moth pupa

The weeds are up to our knees and include grass (couch mostly), nettles, docks, margolds, groundsel and others which I'm not sure of yet. Some have terribly long roots. Oh yes, and the previous tenant's potatoes are doing pretty well for the second year - though they're too blighty to eat :-)
It's a haven for wildlife - particularly beetles, slugs and worms. There are masses of ladybirds around at the moment, but not any aphids for them to eat at present. We also found lots of pupae - mostly Angle Shades moth ones but also smaller ones.... 

Waiting to eat our veg before us!

Beautiful ground beetle

A shiny beetle with mites

Oh, I did plant out the sweet peas - 22 of the seeds germinated and didn't get eaten by slugs. They're looking happy so to keep them that way I surrounded them with mesh. Pigeons love peas, I don't know if sweet peas taste the same but I don't want them to get wiped out before they can afford to lose a few leaves!