so back to the propagator..

from top to bottom: 3 x trays of parmex carrots, 1 x ’sweet chocolate’ sweet pepper, 1x ‘orange banana’ toms, 1 x ’serpette amelioree d’auvergne’ climbing pea and 1 x ‘n. napia’ pointy red sweet pepper.

we’ve had very poor luck with carrots so far, although having read a few blogs i think it’s safe to say we’re not alone. this time around we’ve went for the rounder ball-like variety. this is mostly because it would seem that the soil you need, to avoid getting forked carrots, has to be super fine soil, that has been sifted through a spider’s web, whilst saying a prayer to the angry carrot god TORRAC. the other seeds are having their second chance, as they either didn’t grow or didn’t ripen in time for harvest. further more after graduating from seedling to plants, the toms and peppers are being grown in the mini greenhouse so we can get a better crop. last year we found that the poor summer combined with the allotments windy disposition gave a small crop. although, but before i entirely blame it all on the elements, i should point out i didn’t stake out the plants or keep them to four trusses.

we’ve also started this years flowers:

left is blue lagoon (verbena x hybrida) and right is night phlox (zaluzianskya capensis).

lou also planted some bulbs (daffs?) in the garden, it’d be great if they end up flowering, but failing that they’re ready for next year it’s been very chilly outside, i do wonder what it will do the veg this year. it’d be great if we had a longer summer to make up, so fingers crossed!

i ended up keeping some of the fleece (well actually wasn’t real fleece, more like that weed suppressing membrane) on two rows to warm the ground and force faster growth.

this time around we picked really obscure varieties, made further obscure because shozu failed to upload the photo above, which had the descriptions. so from memory and left to right we have: gypsy mixed with highland burgundy, skerry, salad blue, shetland black, gypsy mixed with highland burgundy and finally dunbar rover.

aren’t they great names? the taters are heritage varieties which can go from blue and purple insides, to black skins with blue rings in white flesh. we’ve had the shetland black before and really enjoyed them.

since my plan for main crops was postponed, i decided to prune the rasps. hopefully i wasn’t too harsh. i made a half arsed attempt to weed the area around them, but it needs more work.

there’s still so much to do and we’ve not made a start on any seedlings. but hey, i guess when you stick food in the grow, you’re technically in growing season eh?

we had roast veg this evening, twas fab. the sweetcorn was so good we had it raw, none of that starchy taste you get from normal sweetcorn!

we’re still fighting the horsetail, we rarely see any couch grass which makes me wonder why people complain about it so much. i spent a good deal of the time weeding near the potatoes which appear to be suffering from a magnesium shortage (they’re going yellow and blotchy).

the next photos are of the beetroot, lettuce, sweetcorn and purple podded peas. everything is looking fab. we harvested one of the lettuces last weekend and we’re impressed by how long it kept.

after much grief from plants and seedlings drying and dying out in the greenhouse, we finally came up with a solution. by sticking all the pots in a seeding/gravel tray they retain the water.

the result of which was that we finally have some courgettes to plant out!

mrs booyaa added more flowers to the “blue” border

finally we came up with a novel use for our leaky tea pot, stick some lobelia in it!

no surprise what yours truly was doing, i was weeding! this time it was the turn of fox town to get a bit of tlc.

before

after

not a bad job if i do say so myself!

yes that is sweet corn you can see on the right. lionel, our plotbour, gave us some small plants and as you can see in the photo below they’re coming along nicely!

the charlottes have very pretty looking flowers, it’ll be time to harvest a few of them soon.

finally here’s another update photo of the whole plot. err half plot.

if you look very closely in the photo below, in the background you can seen our new additions the daleks (aka compost bins). these are 220L jobbies which proved very difficult to get to the allotment, a bus driver refused outright to let us on despite it being an early saturday morning, with no one else on the bus. we’ve already filled up the first one (with our grass and weeds), we’re gambling that we can get the bins hot enough to kill the seeds. we’ll let you know of our progress in a year or two.

and on a parting note, here’s our fruits from our tomatoes, woohoo!

• feed the compost bin with our kitchen waste (yes, can haz compost bins!)
• harvest taters
• pick some raspberries
• weed around the toms
• water everything

foolishly, i thought i could do this in half an hour, it was more like an hour and a half!

i’ve still got to water the rasps and weed the toms, i may have to do that today.

but, the effort is still worth it for the rewards:

sadly the horse tail obliterated our carrot and spring onions. we have a small row of carrots growing away. the beetroot is also doing well.

last weekend we enjoyed a bumper crop of raspberries and there are plenty more ready for this week. the woodlice have pretty much claimed the strawberries as their own.

we got a nice lettuce head growing, which to our surprise has not been nibbled by slugs.

we’ve started growing a few more in pots with copper tape around them, no point hoping for continued good fortune.

finally the best news saved for last, our taters have started to flower

and of course when flowering begins, so can the harvesting!

they tasted lovely, very creamy and sweet. can’t wait till we can harvest more!