Signs of Life!

Our first shoots have appeared - a couple of the onions have sprouted. None of the other onions or shallots have joined them yet, but the temperature did get to -3° over the last couple of days so I don't blame them for staying wrapped up! So warm today that I'm sure it won't be long now...

The strawberries and raspberries have got new leaves sprouting so hopefully by the time we get back to the plot (not till beginning of April) we'll find a few more spots of green and not just weeds!!
Then we'll be ready to start planting spuds and sowing some more seeds - goodo!

Have you seen this film?

http://film.britishcouncil.org/grow-your-own

This is quite an old film now - 2007 - but if you haven't seen it and you have an allotment then you should watch it.
There are certain to be a few characters you recognise from your own allotment site!

Well, we liked it :-)

Potatoes - more chitting

Robert on the allotment gave us some unwanted Chopin potatoes - so they've gone to join our other spuds which are still chitting in my mum's spare (cold) bedroom.
We hadn't heard of Chopin potatoes and couldn't find them on the Potato Council website, but found this article about them and they sound like a good one to try.

Chopin Potatoes

9 weeks on our other potatoes are looking healthy, with the chits not getting too long - they've got another couple of weeks before we intend to put them in the ground.

We've planned out the potato quarter now, so I can't accept any more potatoes from anyone! It's so hard to say no to freebies though!

We've muddled the varieties in the rows a bit because we want to clear the belana when they're very small and some of the others to make room for our leeks. Because we're going to be planting the leeks at the bottom of the quarter we don't want to make it too acidic but the top two rows we are going to be adding Thompson & Morgan "Brimstone Rapide" to the soil. This should hopefully result in the potatoes which are staying in the ground for longer not being as scabby as they have been previously. Not that scabby potatoes taste bad, but they don't look very pretty!

(I've updated the plan on the Crop Rotation plan tab)

At last - some sowing!

Finally, we've sown something - nothing too exciting yet, we're not risking it after the late (late May) frosts we had last year.
So, Jamie sowed 12 broad beans (Suttons), where the Aqua Dulce died, and put their protective cloches on straightaway to stop the mice getting fed before us. We always put a handful of seed compost at the bottom of each hole before dropping the bean in.
We'll get more broad beans sown later in the year too as they're so tasty.

Plastic bottle cloches

And I sowed 3 small rows of salad crops in the raised bed: corn salad (2 year old seed so not sure how good that will be), radish (Dragon F1 Hybrid) and mixed lettuce (I've bought 2 bags of salad leaf from Tescos recently and I really begrudge doing it!!).
This cloche is covered with a green plastic cover and it's quite dark but the salad seems to do ok in there.

The intention is that I'll sow additional rows of each item in about 3 weeks so there'll be a bit of succession growing - though I recall saying that last year and it didn't work out right.

Digging

Jamie did a lot of digging over the last week and has finished the potato quarter - hooray!

Potato quarter

And yesterday he dug a little patch, adding some sand, for spring onions and silverskin onions. Hoops at the ready for enviromesh.

I cleared the area by the bench, took the crazy mint pot home and transplanted the out-of-control sage at the end of plot 8A - just because it would be a shame to throw it away. So I tidied up the herbs and have a pot waiting for par-cel and need another big pot for basil. I split the chives up and have planted them directly into the ground with quite a lot of room for spreading. We're going to sow coriander directly into the ground by the carrot and parsnip trenches.

Herb garden looking a little sad, but it'll be fine...