Back to the allotment

Back to the allotment,
- planted carrots in two ways - ii) sowed in pots and pots buried into the bed, iii) trench of compost, sowed on top and covered with regular earth.
- planted out some mini caulliflowers
- sawed some scaffolding in half and begun the bean frame construction

First Pickings

First crop of the season (not counting purple sprouting broc. - last year's crop, obv) 3 stalks of rhubarb, picked, crumbled, eaten. Thinking of growing more in place of the (apparantly dead) raspberry canes.

Back to the allotment and planted more broad beans.

Currently we have:
Beds 1,2: no beans yet, one line of radishes. Somewhere between 10/20 or each type of bean sowed and germinating
Bed 3: 28 pea plants, a bit scrawny, room for ~140 more, maybe 20 seedings on the go.
Bed 4: 35 broad beans, mixed progress, room for another 20, none on the go
Bed 5: Parsnips, sowed, lots of little weeds
Bed 6: 3 rows of carrots sowed direct, another 2-3 rows worth in pots indoors, germinating
Bed 7: full of onions/shallots/garlic

Bed 8/9: radishes, currently a few cabbages sowed but seem a bit slow, and have confused them with the kohl rabi, Romanescos doing ok, kale too.
Bed 10: Caulliflowers doing well, and getting hardened off atm, not sowed any broccoli yet.
Bed 11: to be leeks/squash, both growing well in greenhouse. Radishes and broot in there first.
Bed 12/13/14: potatoes, on the rise.

Weeding- easily could hoe twice a week if the chance arose, there's a lot of couch grass forming from root ends, and we've got a bit of an influx of Horsetail, the worst weed in the world (tm) also.

Planted two grow bags with small tomato plants this afternoon.

It never ends

More sowings:
a lot more beans (all types bar the runners this time), resowed some cucumbers since the first lot failed to appear, sowed some asparagus, not exactly in compliance with the instructions.

Realised that there's massive confusion between cabbages and kohl rabi, and that I never write the bloody names of the bloody seeds on the bloody pots. Or I do and it washes off. Need to do some sort of stock take to work out what we have and what we need more of (everything!).

Back to the allotment

Everything looking much the same, only slightly bigger.

Planted some peas out - they might be pigeon fodder so we need to go back and install some sort of deterrent fairly soon.

Also started building a bean frame, although disagreement remains about my construction skills and the resulting sturdiness likely to result

More mud in the kitchen

Yesterday:
sowed some beans - runners, yin yangs, cherokees, borlottos
probably a bit early for the runners if anything, but two trips to the garden centre and all the plantlets they're selling fired me into action

Today:
repotted chillis aubergines and foxgloves, lemongrass
topped up some cabbage plantlets, and celeriac (still tiny)

Plant your carrots on Easter Monday?

Planted 2 types of parsnips - Little Gem and Guernsey 1/2-long, a few seeds to a station, ~10 stations to a row, 10 rows. (put the fleece back on afterwards)
Also planted a couple of rows of Salsify.
Finally planted 3 rows of carrots - direct sowings, thinly sown, - 1 row of each of: Giant Red, Chantenay Royal and some baby carrots.
We're planning to sow some carrots indoors for transplanting, and some others in newspaper pots directly into the ground, with a view to helping them not go wiggly.

Everything else looking ok at the allotment. There were some rogue frenchmen playing boules. Very peculiar.

Threw away the Kale/Spinach sown the other week since it all germinated at the same time along with some very un-squashlike germinating from the squash pots, so I think i must have spilt some seed into everything. Resowed the kale and romanescos.

plant your potatoes on Good Friday...

...or the next day.

Planted two beds of potatoes - one with 6 Roosters and the rest all Ratte, the other full of pink fir apples - ~35 odd of the latter. Three rows in each bed, in a medium deep trench with some chicken pellets, just like on Gardeners' World last night.

Took a look at the Carrots and Parsnips beds, trying to plan some fiendish scheme to avoid twisty roots.

General hoeing. Looks like it needs doing 2-3 times a week. Didn;t water as there's been rain in the last 24 hours.

Broad Beans, Onions, Garlic, Shallots all looked ok. No sign from the first earlies, or any of the intercrops.

Back to the Allotment

Onions, Garlic and Shallots:

Broad Beans:

The plot is pretty windy, so we had to go back and add some more canes for the Broad Beans

Allotment Sunday

Planted out broad beans which have been raised indoors.
Also sowed some intercrops - radishes (3 types), beetroot, spring onions, baby leeks. Dunno if they'll have long enough until the beds' rightful owners are ready to move in, but it's worth a stab.
Directly planted broad beans, garlic (although weirdly the garlic in pots is doing better than that in the ground), onions and shallots, raspberries all doing pretty well. No sign of the potatoes yet.
Sowed some more broad beans indoors.

No photos, forgot camera.

Potatoes

Planted Roosters and Pink Fir Apples at mum's place. In shallow trenches, with a covering of topsoil/old peat.

More seedlings

Sowed:
Kale, two types
Spinach
Squash, two types
Romanesco Caulliflowers
Courgettes
small pool of muddy water

Shallots

Took the fleece off the Onions/Shallots, because they looked like they were being a bit stunted by the fleece on top. Shallots especially, but Onions too look like they've got off to a pretty good start.

The broad beans planted directly in the ground, too, are beginning to show.