Greenhouse

Soil temperature today was  7^oC .

I decided to mow the back lawn today.  It was the first cut of the year.  Amazingly the mower started first time although I had left some petrol in it over the winter.  I will do the front lawn tomorrow.  I will also give the lawns a good feed for the spring.

After this, I went in and sorted out the green house.  It seems that I have already run out of space.  I need the sweet peas to be planted out as soon as possible.  For that to happen the canes will have to be put up on the allotment.  I will do that next week.   I have about 20 plants that survived through the winter and these will be the first ones to go out.

The February sown sweetpeas are still a little too small even to pinch out so they will be left in the green house for now.  I took them all out of the small plastic tower greenhouse at the back of my glass greenhouse and put them on the staging.  I left the tomatoes, leeks and lettuce in the plastic greenhouse together with the Kestrel and Pink Fir Apple potatoes.  The potatoes are chitting away well and they will be fine for another few weeks while the soil warms up a little.  I was thinking of putting the Oca out with the potatoes too.  I will do that tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I will have to prick out the onions, lettuce and leeks into sectioned seed trays  and then I will definitely have no room left in the greenhouse.

I want to start my peas off in the green house too so I will have to squeeze these into the greenhouse somehow.   The main reason for starting the peas off in the greenhouse is because the pigeons seem to love to eat all the seed that   I plant in the allotment.  It also seems to give them a good start and I can put some mychorrhizal fungi in the planting trays.  I am not planting so many seeds this year because I am going to plant them a little further apart than last year.  I am hoping that they will produce more peas like this.  I will be putting inoculated charcoal in the planting holes again this year.

I was going to pick some Brussel sprouts today but they are still a little too small.  I will get some parsnips tomorrow.  They are really all that is left in the allotment at the moment.  I think that only four of the winter cauliflowers will produce anything this year.

I dug in the compost that I put on the onion bed and then moved the tarpaulin over the dug area.  I will put compost on the rest of this bed and dig it in.  I will have to get a photograph of that compost heap.

Something had eaten through the stem of one of my garlic plants which was a little annoying.  Now I have a gap in the row.