Starting to look like a real allotment.
I'm beginning to make some major progress with the plot. Yesterday turned out to be a washout, but today warmed up nicely after lunch and the late afternoon into evening was beautifully warm and thankfully still after the recent high winds.
Now that things are warming up again, I'm starting to plant in earnest.
I'm a bit concerned by mice on the plot at the moment. My dwarf french beans I'd started off in the polytunnel got unearthed the first night after I planted them. Yesterday, I dumped a potato on the compost heap and by this morning, it had been gnawed by mice to a scary degree. I just hope they keep away from my seedlings - especially my peas, which I've got hidden away under fleece at the moment and which are coming on nicely. Next to the peas, I've got radish germinating which now seems to be developing at a decent rate.
Best of all though, walking past the asparagus bed today I noticed that a few spears have broken through at quite an astonishing rate. There was nothing there yesterday. Today, a couple are the best part of two inches tall. This really made my day, as asparagus is the one crop above all else which I'm looking forward to harvesting. Shame I've got to wait until next year before I can start cropping.
A while back, I split a couple of grow bags and mixed them into my nursery seed beds. After repeated hoeing and raking, they're now nice and fine, with the compost well combined into the surface. So I celebrated the fact today by planting some more Boltardy beetroot, spring onions and leeks.
Yesterday's weather had a couple breaks in the rain for just long enough to erect my bean poles. The latest thing seems to be horizontal frames for beans, with a roof you can grow the beans over so the crop hangs down, making harvesting nice and easy. Me, I went for the old school approach with some 8ft hazel coppice poles. You can keep the ease of harvesting. I'm loving the traditional look!
I also took my first 4 Gardener's Delight tomato plants down to the plot and transplanted them into the polytunnel. In an ideal world, I'd have liked to have let them develop a bit bigger at home, but I needed the window space for starting other stuff off.
After coming home, I set about filling the gap on the window sill. I've now planted loads more modules with cabbage, courgette, cucumber, peppers and some more French beans to replace the ones the mice got to. Tomorrow, I'm planning on taking melon seedlings and some chives to the plot. Hopefully some more stuff will be good to go in the next week or so too. Need to free up some space so I can pot on the huge number of celeriac seedlings which have finally burst into life in one of my propagators!
April 3, 2010
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Tags: bean poles, beetroot, leeks, spring onions В· Posted in: Construction, Pests, Seeds, Vegetables
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