Little Things

Still no rain and as everything is growing it's getting thirstier. Small fruits are appearing in the greenhouse: a couple of cute aubergines

Each of the pepper plants have multiple peppers on them - all green at the moment, but we should have yellow, red and orange.

We're so pleased that we finally have some carrot seeds that have germinated - they took a long time coming but we can just see them in a couple of rows now. Much more speedy to grow were the Pink/Purple Sun radishes - these were only sowed a week ago.

And our little salad turnips are coming along nicely - I'll let them get a bit bigger.

Unfortunately the rows of radishes which looked so great a week ago have mostly got too big and are no longer tasty so they're destined for the compost bin. Fellow-plotholder, Neal, let me have some of his lettuce seedlings so I've put them in the ground - they look pretty dead, but they usually recover...

They're filling the gap between our carrots and our Brussels sprout plants - our three plants had become two after some beastie got into our nursery plot, so we had to fill the gap with one of Ivan's spare seedlings. We've also planted up some runners from our strawberry plants - they were delicious but rather short-lived - not sure whether it was the weather or the variety. We need some plants which will provide delicious fruit later in the season.

We bit the bullet and bought some chemicals to spray the broad bean plants which look like they may survive the aphid attack to produce full beans... We bought the pesticide because we noticed blackfly moving onto the leaves of some of our other beans and it doesn't seem like the natural deterrents are working...

These are our Edamame (soya) beans. And at last the Asparagus Pea plants are getting slightly bigger, but they're usually quicker to grow than this.

This is the structure for our Rocky cucumbers to climb up - one chicken wire door each. I wonder if the cucumbers will hang down like we want them to...

But I still haven't worked out the climbing frame for the squashes.... how long have I been talking about this?!

So lots of things are growing, but most are pretty small at the moment which is why they need so much water. But these clouds that were building towards each other just dissipated and brought us not a drop...

If you're in the area - come and visit us!

Here's a track about all these little things, which will hopefully not take too much longer to be big things! (from Danny Elfman)

Celebration

Oh yes! Sunday evening was a time to celebrate - England scoring six goals in a World Cup match! OK, so it was Panama and they got one back, but really, it was very exciting. So we went crazy and celebrated on the allotment....

Hahaha, well, we hadn't prepared for a BBQ! But it was a beautiful hot evening to sit and watch the moon rise and the sun sink.

I picked the first of the broad beans - had them in a delicious salad for my lunch.

The plants are being destroyed by blackfly, so we're going to pull the most damaged ones, but I want to harvest a few more beans off them first.

The blackfly seem to halt the growth of the beans, but if they don't get onto the pods until they've grown a bit they don't generally affect the bean - however, they're disgusting to pick!

So, now it's time to singalong with Kool & The Gang.

Rock On

We've had some lovely sunny and hot days, with not a drop of rain so we've been watering every evening between World Cup football matches. One evening we found these in our greenhouse.

They're from neighbouring plotholder, Kate, and I'm now really looking forward to our 'HAHA Rocks' stone-painting stall at our Open Day next month. The '<Town Name> Rocks' craze has been going for a while now all over the country. We have lots of stones on site that could be improved with  decoration and we're happy for them to be taken away to spread joy round the country!!

You can see how dry the earth is, but everything is growing well and that bare earth should be quite well hidden by lush growth soon...

Like our potato plot is - the flowers are out on most of the plants now.

And the tomato plants in the greenhouse have the promise of future tasty toms.

Peppers are just beginning to form on the pepper plant nearest the door.

I spent time today planting flowers into tubs for prettying up the site for the Open Day. I hope three weeks is long enough to get some blooms...

I also sowed a few seeds - another row of beetroot and a row divided between black-skinned radish and some pink/purple fleshed ones - I think they're larger than normal salad radish, which have grown particularly well this year.

The trailling squash are finally planted - one each of: Festival, Boston Giant, Autumn Crown and Honeyboat. I still haven't worked out how to build the trellis, but I'm thinking about it...

We planted 14 of each sweetcorn plants during the week and will leave them protected in their bottle cloches for a while.

And today I pulled the garlic as the stems had yellowed-off completely, they should dry out nicely in this weather (cue the rain!). All those from one french garlic bought at the Hungerford Food Festival last year.

So, now it's back to footie - but just time to listen to the oh-so-dreamy David Essex for the title track

The Number of the Beast

Ah, you don't know how long I've waited for my 666th blogpost so that I could use this song title! The closest I got to a photo of a beast is these tiny hedgehogs that Richard found on his plot. We're hoping that the mother was somewhere close-by.

It was a very windy day on the site and not very warm, but we got plenty done. Jamie's prepared the way for sowing our carrots. We're only growing Eskimo this year, no earlies. I planted out a Goldmine  courgette on Plot46A - I filled a big hole with manure and drenched it before I put the plant in. The salad bed on 46A is growing well, even after a mole made its way through the bed.

The purple sprouting brocolli plants (bought at the plant sale) are in - secured against well hammered-in metal poles. That should keep them upright, unlike last year. And I planted the two celeriac plants in an old recycling bin. I'll need to keep them well watered and need to remember to earth them up as they bulb up.

We didn't have time to plant out the two types of sweetcorn, but I planted out the second sowing of Borlotti and Edamame (soya) beans. We need to re-sow our dwarf french beans as only one germinated.

And the Winter squashes can wait a little longer too - I won't be planting them all, probably just one of each type. Plus I have some flowers to plant up. Oh, so much to do!

We were pleased to see the lovely flowers have appeared on two of the aubergine plants.

And here's a better harvest photo - even a few mangetout are ready - that's a couple of lunches sorted.

So here they are, Iron Maiden with 666 - the number of the beast. Sing along!

In Bloom

The main point of this post is to show off these lovely flowers we have, thanks to fellow plotholders. Beautiful, sweet-scented pinks (from Ivan's plot) and lovely cornflowers (from Alison's plot) - they're the tallest cornflowers I've ever seen and certainly aren't the larkspur that the seedpacket showed!!

And more beautiful sweetpeas from Ivan's plot. Mine still have no flowers.

It's been a warm week with no rain so we've been watering, watering, watering every day after work. We've got plants that are desperate to get out of their pots and into the ground, but there hasn't been time so that's the plan for the weekend, however, it's World Cup time (Yay - Come on England!) so we'll have to fit the allotment in around the matches. This photo is through the pot of Summer bulbs (Ixia and Dutch Iris) I planted in March, which are looking lovely.

We've had lots of delicious strawberries during the week and I've had some tasty salad leaf and radish additions to my lunches - not enough to make a full salad yet though.
The coffee lounge at work has started bagging up their coffee grounds - I couldn't resist, so added these to our compost, I need to think of a better way of making use of them really.

A great Nirvana song title to enjoy.