Thursday 31 May 2012

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...

Monday 28 May 2012

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!!

Saturday 26 May 2012

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!).

Wednesday 23 May 2012

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!

Sunday 20 May 2012

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