Another gorgeous day

After a chilly week, Saturday was a lovely warm but breezy day.  I had a couple of hours in the afternoon to myself so I potted on the tomato seedlings (5 of Moneymaker and 14 of Harbinger) and watered the sweet peas.  At the plot, I spent an hour or so hoeing around the garlic patch and the neighbouring soil around the gooseberry and blackberry bushes.

Four of the purple sprouting plants had a slim, central sprout and I asked one of my neighbours if I should harvest them.  We thought that perhaps I should.  Later, I read up on it and it seems that picking the central sprout will stimulate the side shoots to grow.  I'm such a broccoli-growing novice.

At home, I sowed some Brussels sprouts and some calabese.

I nipped over for just 10 mins this afternoon so I cut the sprouts and had the very modest pickings with my dinner.  I think I cut one of them too far so that one may not sprout any more.  We'll see.  No sign of any sprouts on the white sprouting plants.

I took a couple of piccies on my phone.

The broad beans are short but looking good.  There are flowers on a couple of the plants already.

This photo shows most of the right hand side of the plot.  The garlic is in the foreground with (starting from the bottom) 1 row of Lautrec Wight, 2 rows of Early Purple Wight, 2 rows of Solent Wight and 1 row of Elephant Garlic.  Beyond those is the rhubarb clumps, gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes.  Beyond that are the brassicas under the mesh.  Messy but productive for this time of year.

My next tasks are to feed and water the garlic and to dug over some patches on the left hand side.

Back at home, 5 tiny celeriac seedings have made an appearance on the windowsill.

Sowing update

Just a quick note to remind myself (in future years) that on Wednesday I sowed the following:

• Leek (Bleu de Solaise)
• Celeriac (Prinz)
• Cabbage (Marner Early Red)
• Pak Choi (White Petiole)
• Swiss Chard (Fantasy F1 Hybrid and Lucullus)
• Mizuna
• Spring Onion (White Lisbon)

The Celeriac and Pak Choi are indoors while the others are outside on the patio.

On one of the windowsills upstairs, the tomatoes have germinated ok and the 3 types of chillies are coming through well (no sign yet of the Iranian ones unfortunately).  I may transplant some of the tomato seedlings today as some look big enough with tiny true leaves.  

Not sure I'll sow anything today but I may get an hour or two for some gentle weeding and clearing this morning.

First session of the year

I had my first proper session of the year on the plot on Saturday.  3 hours in all.  Bliss on such a gorgeous Spring day.  I badly needed to get back in touch with it after such a long, enforced (it felt like that) break.

The priority was to freshen up the white and purple sprouting plants in the top right corner.  They still had tunnel nets covering them and I was hoping they had started into growth.  They had indeed (slightly) along with the neighbouring Spring cabbages. I weeded, fed and watered them all and recovered them with the enviromesh that had been covering the Brussels sprouts to hopefully allow more light in.  I may change that for wider gauge netting soon.  Surprisingly, it was the purple sprouting showing more promised, with 4 or 5 plants sprouting tiny purple heads in the middle, despite my expectations (set by the labels) that the white sprouting would come first.

I took one of the 2 compost bins I had been using for pernicious weeds at the bottom end of the plot and placed it (emptied) at the top left corner to restart the compost heap.  Into this, I tipped the Brussels sprout plants, tired chard plants, and foliage from the leeks and parsnips (which I dug up, taking home quite a haul later - a whole carrier bag full for making curried allotment soup).  I'll now need to take the old weeds to the tip as I can't seem to "do" bonfires.

Near the main gate to the site, just one plot away, there are plans for a concrete standing so that plotters can bring on trailers if needed.  Two reliable sources informed me that the crowns of rhubarb there were for the taking (or destined for the compost heap) so I forked up 3 small crowns with healthy looking buds and put them on my plot where the chard had been.  I figured that my craving for rhubarb crumble (currently satisfied by expensive trips to the lovely greengrocer in town) needs more than the single young crown I had.

I finished off by weeding, feeding and watering the broad bean patch.  Hopefully they'll soon get away.

I was a tad worried that I just don't have room for anything else to go in but now the parsnips and leeks are out there is some space immediately freed up.  There are also 2-3 patches of plot that have been covered over Winter so are ready to by dug over (slowly and carefully).  There should then be room for tomatoes, summer brassicas, courgettes, sweetcorn, leeks, parsnips, beans, Brussels and other things.  Maybe even flowers (I've a free packet of poppy seeds to use to attract bees).  I've decided to forego spuds and onions this year as they are easily bought but will do those next year.

Next weekend, I hope to have time to weed and feed the garlic patch as it is all up now and the soil seems capped so needs opening up (or perhaps the capping is a good thing?).  I also plan to sow lots of seeds at home including chard, celeriac and brassicas.

Talking of home, I stubbornly dug up a 0.8m-wide strip of lawn in our small back garden to give me some sunny-ish space for planting (much of the lawn is in shade) and forked in some well-rotted manure.  While little one was napping on Wednesday, I planted some yellow tulips, daffs and mixed sweet peas purloined from the local farm shop and a "hedge veg" stall (a term I picked up in Guerney where they are very popular) on the side of the road in the next village along from us.  Since then, I've nipped in a bay tree (which was over a foot high and very bushy and a snip at £3.75 from a nursery) and some bronze fennel.  The colour scheme I am aiming for in our back garden is bright yellow, orange and green (our wedding colours) while there will be a focus on pinks, purples, whites and blues in the front garden.  Little one has since announced that pink, purple and white are her favourite colours.

Starting the new gardening year

I've come to regard March 1st as the start of the new gardening year when I can start sowing seeds.  I've tried sowing seeds before March in previous years but they didn't come to much.  The sight of gorgeous drifts of daffs around the village and down in Cornwall (where the little one and I ventured in the week) gets me thinking about sowing seeds.

The weather has been a bit grey and drizzly today but I did get the main job of the week done - turning the contents of one of my compost bins over to the other.  A couple of weeks ago, I managed to empty one of them onto the two beds in the front garden.  The compost was lovely with just a few egg shells showing.  The hellebores and snowdrops look happy for it.  The other compost bin was mostly full of the turf I'd removed from the front garden to make the second bed (with added veg waste from the kitchen).

Just before the harder rain set in just now, I managed to sow some tomato and chilli seeds.  I think this may be the earliest I've sown tomatoes for a while (will need to look back) so fingers crossed I'll get a crop before the blight.

I've sown Moneymaker and Harbinger tomatoes and Serrano (free from a Wahaca restaurant but not stored terribly well subsequently in various handbags - oops), Iranian (from seed saved a few years ago), Westlandse (ditto) and Lemon Drop.  I wasn't successful with Lemon Drop at all last year so I'm giving them one last chance.  The tomatoes are on an upstairs windowsill while the chillies are covered with a carrier bag and sitting in the airing cupboard for some extra warmth.

My plan over March, aside from tidying the gardens up after winter and sowing more seeds, is to lift up some turf in the back garden to give me some space to put pots out on the sunnier side of it.  I may also plant some flowers too in yellows and oranges.  This is why I had to get the compost bins turned - I'll be filling one up with turf again.

Missing the plot

Nothing more to say about the weather...I'll bore myself.

I did pop over to the plot for the first time in 2014 a couple of weeks ago for 10 mins just to take a look. I was expecting carnage but the only thing amiss (literally) was the compost bin I had started filling with veg leftovers.  Then I had an hour last Sunday to plant the 20 raspberry canes (10 Polka and 10 Glen Ample), 1 blackcurrant bush (Big Ben) and 1 gooseberry bush (Invicta) I'd bought from Blackmoor Nurseries.  I had to work fast and just plonked them in really.  The canes were a bit close together and had been bare rooted for 4 days in a bag but hopefully they'll live.  

Soon it'll be time to starting thinking about sowing seeds on the windowsill...

Blown it

I hadn't been to the plot for a few weeks, not properly anyway.  The weather hasn't been great and it has been busy at home.  I nipped over for half an hour yesterday to check on things.

The main development was that some of the Brussels plants had obviously grown some lovely sprouts but that many of them had blown already.  I picked all the ones that were of a decent button size and took them home with 4 leeks and a cabbage.  I have blanched a handful of decent-looking tight sprouts to freeze for Christmas and cooked up a leek, potato and sprout soup with the sprouts that had exploded.  An allotment soup for all the family.  Yum!  Hopefully.

Bean there, done that

It has been a few weeks since my last post but I have spent some time over at the plot.  I've cleared out the courgette plants and the sweetcorn (leaving the butternut squash ones behind as they have some small green fruit and I can't bear to rip them out yet).  There were still some patty pans coming but they were becoming moldy.  I've harvested half of the leeks as they look rusty and not very happy.  They taste ok though.

Last Sunday/Monday, we were warned of strong hurricane-strength winds so I nipped over to see what I could fasten down.  Winds were already picking up by lunchtime but I decided to leave the mesh where it was, over the Brussels, spring cabbages and sprouting, and just bring the tools I couldn't fit in the storage box home.  When I checked on things on Tuesday, nothing had budged except a couple of homemade wood and mesh frames from a neighbouring plot.  They had made there way onto mine.

I nipped over very briefly today with husband and toddler to quickly sow the broad beans where the courgettes and sweetcorn had been.  My toddler "helped" in her own way by throwing beans randomly into the shallow trench I had made.  It will be a minor miracle if any of the beans germinate.  Not just because of the hasty sowing but also because a large proportion of the seeds are from last year and had been kept badly in an outside storage box.  They even got rained on in their packet at some point.  For this reason, I sowed 2 per station in many places to hedge my bets.

My husband is quite impressed with the state of the plot.  It does look like I've dug over most of it though it is more like three-quarters.  Hopefully, I can get the rest of it dug over Christmas.

A quick check on the garlic bed showed that the Early Purple is living up to its name by being the first to send up shoots.