The start of the busy period on the allotment

I have planted all the sweet peas now and still have room for the runner beans.  It has taken me several days to get them all in but I have impressed myself with the patients I have undertaken the task.  I have not written down the varieties in my book which will cause problems if I loose the small labels.  I usually do a sketch to show the row each variety is in.  I will have to do that tomorrow.

I think that the reward of lots of flowers will be good enough to compensate for the aching legs.  I am getting too old for this crouching down to plant bit of gardening.  Why can't plants grow at chest level?

I planted two early potato varieties.  One was "Red Duke of York" but I can't remember what the other one was.  I put some bamboo charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi in each of the planting holes.  I am seriously running out of mychorrhizal fungi now.  I was going to put tomatoes in ring culture pots alongside the path but I don't think that I will have room now.  However, I have a cunning plan and will put them elsewhere.

I have watered the winter cauliflowers with comfrey liquid again to keep them growing well.  I also put some on the leeks, the garlic and strawberries.

Believe it or not the tulips are beginning to flower now - in March!  I watered these with comfrey liquid too.

The carrots have been sown - before the parsnips!  I was going to plant the parsnips as well but I ran out of time.  Not to worry though because thinning and watering will give me large roots regardless.

The carrots were planted with a little of the bamboo charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi.    The old, wire cloche supports were put in over the carrot seed drills and covered with enviromesh to act as a barrier and keep the Psila rosea off the seedlings.

Just planted the sweet peas.

Plans go out of the window when other things get in the way.  I had several jobs to do in the morning but got round to preparing the Brussel sprouts for dinner.  I also washed some broccoli and potatoes.  This is really all that is available from the allotment apart from some manky parsnips and carrots.

It took me quite a while to fill the car with the sweet pea seedlings.  I could not put all the pots in the car so had to leave four varieties behind.  When I got down to the allotment, several people wanted to chat about allotmenty type things.  This took up at least 45 minutes.

Only then could the sweet pea seedlings be planted.  Honeymoon, Lipstick, Jilly, Gwendoline, Epicure, White supreme, Lizbeth, Angela Ann,  Eclipse and Anniversary.  I have still to plant Oban Bay, Nora Holman and Restormel.  Lizbeth has a particularly good scent.

When they were planted some inoculated charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi were added to the planting hole.  I would like to say that these helped the sweet peas to produce large amounts of flower last year.  However, this is just anecdotal evidence and needs to be tested scientifically before any major claims can be verified.

Planting sweet pea seedlings takes up a large amount of time but I do not resent it particularly if they all come well.  It does mean that there was no time to plant anything else.  It's a good job I have so much on the go in the greenhouse.

Now that I have planted out the sweet peas, I have a lot of pots and labels which will be washed and used again for various seedlings that need to be transplanted or potted on.  I reckon that I will have used all the pots and labels at least twice this year.

This is what allotment gardening is all about.  Growing vegetables and flowers with the least expense possible.  Someone has left some plant pots by the gate for anyone to have.  They need to be washed carefully to make sure that they are not carrying disease.  I reckon that I will have some of them and wash them with the empty sweet pea pots.

Tomato seed sowing

Sowed the Lycopersicon esculentum seed in a three inch pot using New Horizon's multi-purpose peat free "compost". I did not sow all the seed I had because there is no guarantee that I can keep the seedlings alive this time of the year.  I have other varieties of tomato and these will be sown in February.

I put the pot in the airing cupboard so that it would have enough heat to germinate.

The "All the year round" Brassica oleracea botrytis has germinated well and I will be pricking the seedlings out into 3 inch pots very soon.  The Allium cepa "Ailsa Craig and Befordshire Champion" have germinated but I will leave these for a while before I prick them out into larger pots.

I watered the Lathyrus odoratus  today.  I hope that I will not regret it.  They tend to get fungi attacking them this time of year if they are watered.  Phytophthora and Pythium, which are like fungi and Rhizoctonia and Fusarium, which are fungi, all attack seedlings.  This kind of attack is called damping off.  It is less likely to happen if the compost or growing medium are carefully sterilised but this time of year there is always the threat.

I might try germinating some Lactuca sativa and some Brassica oleracea capitata in the next few days.  

I washed quite a few pots today using washing up liquid diluted in a bucket of water.   There is some suggestion that it is not too important to wash pots nowadays because of the use of sterilised planting mediums that are almost always used.  I would question this.  To avoid the transmission of plant pathogens washing carefully in soapy water is a fairly essential procedure.

Now that I am going to start to make my own composts, I think that keeping pots and tools clean is only prudent.

October sowing the sweet peas

Clean surface

Using a cleaned and washed surface, a three to one mix of New Horizon multipurpose compost to sharp sand was mixed up to sow the Lathyrus odoratus into. The varieties sown were; Lipstick, Lizbeth, Honeymoon, Anniversary, Jilly, Nora Holman, Restormel, Gwendoline, Angela Ann, Eclipse, and Oban Bay. 

One seed was planted in each washed three inch pot. 

Labels were then written giving the genus, species and variety.

Writing the labels on top of a crate made it a little easier.  The labels were inserted in each of the pots.

 As it was raining I left the pots outside to be watered by the rain.

The pots were returned to the greenhouse after getting a thorough watering and lined up on the staging.  They will remain there until March next year. 

A new Rheum rhaponticum 'Timperley Early' was potted up so that it could be put into the allotment later.  It was a small plant which might benefit from growing on without competition.  I will plant it in the spring with mychorrhizal fungi and some inoculated charcoal.  

Rheum rhaponticum ''Timperley Early' in the large pot

Allium ascolonicum were planted in pots for the winter. I am not planting them outside at the moment to avoid the onion miner fly Phytomyza gymnostoma.

After writing it out quite a few times, I learnt that Lathyrus odoratus is the Latin name for sweet pea.  I still need to learn the species name of Rheum rhaponticum. 

Pencil is an adequate writing implement for labels.  It does not come off easily, which was witnessed yesterday when I had to resort to using silver soap to clean the writing off the plant labels.  

I need to get some more plant labels.  

Exhibition sweet peas - taking off side shoots and tendrils.

In order to get really big flowers on sweet peas, I take off the side shoots and tendrils on the main stem.  I try to take the side shoots off before they get too big but they do grow very quickly. If you leave them for any length of time, bigger ones have to be removed .  The big ones I cut out with a pair of scissors, while the smaller ones can be pinched out with finger and thumb.

Sweet pea with side shoots and tendrils.

You can see that this Restormel sweet pea is lolling about because I had not tied it up for about 3 days.  They have grown very quickly and you have to keep an eye on them.  If the stem distorts, then the flowers are not as good as they would be from straight stems.  There are no flower buds on this plant although it should be developing flowers fairly soon now.

In order to keep the stem as straight as I can, I tie the stem or leaves onto the cane with green garden wire.  Garden wire is quite a harsh material to tie them up with and it can damage the leaves or stem.  This disadvantage has to be tempered with the advantage of speed.  If I had to tie up each sweet pea plant with string, it would take much longer than the three hours it took to take off the tendrils; remove the side shoots and tie the stems yesterday afternoon.

Row of tied up Valerie Harrod Sweet pea

I had taken off all the tendrils and the side shoots of the Valerie Harrod before I remembered I wanted to take a photograph of sweet peas with them left on.  The plants are over 300mm tall now so they will be forming their first flower buds.  The first flower stalks usually have two or three flower buds.  I am aiming to get at least four flower buds on each stem.  In order for the flowers to be exhibition standard they should be fairly equal distance apart with no big gaps on the stem.  If you are growing outside, then this is quite difficult to achieve.  Those growing indoors will be able to regulate the watering and feeding to a much higher degree and this means the flowers will be more evenly distributed.  

The aim for me is to produce as near to exhibition standard as I can outside.  

You might find this funny but I am not planning to exhibit any of my sweet pea flowers.  The fun for me is to see if I can get my flowers better than those that do exhibit their flowers.  

Like the last scene in the Jericho Mile with Peter Strauss, I've got my own Olympics going on here.  It's all about awe and wonder.  

Awe, I wonder why I'm doing this.

To get a full description of how I grow sweet peas have a look at:
http://tonythegardener.blogspot.co.uk/p/how-i-grow-exhibition-sweet-peas.html

The nematode worms arrived on Thursday last week and I put them on the allotment on Friday.  It says that you can store them in the refrigerator for a couple of days without damaging them.  I put them on the squashes, the climbing French beans, the courgettes, the runner beans, the lettuce and the beetroot.  All plants that slugs seem to devour with relish.  They seem to be doing their job because the climbing French beans are beginning to recover from their devastation.  The rhubarb seemed to be affected by slugs and snails so I put some nematodes under their leaves.

I planted two rows of bortolloti beans in the pea and bean bed.  It might still be too early for things like these but it is getting towards the end of May so, regardless of the unseasonal weather, I would be putting them out now anyway.  I watered them in with dilute comfrey liquid but I did not add mychorrhizal fungi to the planting hole.  When I planted the seed I put some mychorrhizal fungi in the pot.  I just have enough room to plant the Cannellini beans.

This bed was hoed with the big hoe and the onion hoe.

I took off the nets and hoed between the brassicae plants.  They all seem to be growing very well.

I seemed to have sown the turnip and the radish very thinly because although they have germinated there are not as many as I was expecting.  I am going to sow another row of them this week so it does not matter a great deal.

I took out a row of brocolli plants I had planted earlier in order to plant some red Brussel sprouts.  There is no way that I will use the brocolli from three rows so I thought  I could sacrifice one in the cause of novel Brussel sprouts.  The Brussel sprouts were a freebe given to me by "Tony down the bottom".  Thanks Tony.

Another freebe that Andy gave me was two red cabbage.  Now this is sensible because sometimes I put a full row of red cabbage in and there is just so much pickled cabbage that you can eat in a year or two...

Two red cabbages are sufficient.

The only brassicas that I like to feed are the cabbages and the summer cauliflowers.  I gave each row a good dose of dilute comfrey liquid.  Now remember that the "comfrey liquid" is really a mixture of nettles, sweet cicely and comfrey so has a relatively high nitrogen content.  This is what we want for leafy vegetables.

Most of the time I spend on the allotment  is in  keeping the weeds down so hoeing with Dutch hoe, swoe and onion hoe seems to take up a lot of my time.  I had to hand weed between the climbing French beans and the runner beans because it was awkward to get the hoe into the space between the canes.

I also like to hand weed along the rows of roots because then you can start to thin out as well.  I will definitely have  to thin the carrots this week.

The onions got a good feed with dilute comfrey liquid and were sprayed with some gumption to keep the onion miner fly away.  I doubt whether it will but you can try.

I planted another row of lettuce; a row of leeks and a row of celeriac in the space I had left.  Now allotment 26 is full and I cannot squeeze anything else into it.

I hoed up the pink fir apple potatoes a little more.  They did not really need it but it helps to hoe out the weeds.  There weren't many weeds to speak of but what there were were dealt with.

Picked some more strawberries.  Then went down to the comfrey patch to plant some walking stick cabbages.  They are just a novelty plant but I want to see peoples faces when they start to grow very big.

The second row of the Woden beetroot and the rainbow Swiss chard have germinated and are starting to grow well.

I took several lettuce from the first row I planted together with spinach and rocket to make a salad with.  They have gone a bit limp from Sunday but I still put them into a sandwich today and they tasted fantastic.  With a following of strawberries and cream what else could you want?