Did I plant things a little too early?

After a thunder storm has just passed by, I have to reflect on whether I have planted frost sensitive plants out too early this year.  Really I would not be planting things like runner and French beans until the end of May.  Due to the unseasonally warm dry weather in April, I have been lulled into a false sense of security.

The old saying is do not cast a clout until May is out  and maybe that applies to delicate plants too.  The courgettes certainly seem to be suffering.  So too do the potatoes.  Still I can't do anything about it now.  The potatoes are almost 12 inches tall now.

Spent today weeding the onions and the leeks.  Hoeing up the potatoes and weeding the roots.  I have still got to weed the carrots and the parsnips and plant the Swiss Chard.

Filling up the allotment.

The problem with this time of year is that you don't know when the last frost will strike.  Last night the allotment had a relatively mild frost, however it affected my potatoes.  They were not cut right back but tonight there might be another frost and this time they will find it very difficult to avoid being affected badly.

There is little I can do because they are quite big now - over 6 inches tall.  Even further earthing up would not help.  I will just have to grin and bear it.

I planted another row of brocolli and that really fills the brassicae bed except for a small area which I might use to put some turnips into.  My daughter wants me to grow an enormous turnip for her F2 reception class. (Four and five year olds) There seems to be a book with a similar title.

I put another row of leeks in and this time I added inoculated charcoal to the planting holes.  I haven't been doing this recently because I had run out of charcoal.  I also added some mychorrhizal fungi.  I was going to leave the leeks exposed to the elements but, after some thought,  I decided to cover them with enviromesh and fleece. I used old cloche wires as supports and buried the edges in the soil.  I had to use this combination because neither was long enough to cover the row.  Now I have run out of things to cover the leeks with so I will just have to take my chances and leave them exposed to the ravages of the leek miner fly.

Now that the allotment is virtually full, there is more time to concentrate on the allotment too far.  There will be some opportunity tomorrow to clear a little more of the jungle.  I need to take my loppers to cut down a damson sapling and the brambles.  I will also try to demolish the corrugated iron compost bins.

I still have not transplanted the celeriac yet and believe it or not I will have to resow my French beans because they have not germinated again.  If at first you don't suck seed, try drier grain.

I am hoping the weather will break tomorrow and we will get a little rain.   It will not stop the frosts by the looks of the forecast but the ground is so dry that some of the plants have stopped growing.

I will take some pictures of the allotment in early May tomorrow.  It is interesting to see how the allotment has changed month by month.  I will also write something about identifying soils and soil profiles.

I hope there are no frosts this week.

Not very exciting but I planted out the sweet corn and the summer cauliflowers.  I had a small area next to the onions that I had left for the sweet corn and without any previous calculations twenty of them fitted just right into the space available.  I watered them in with comfrey liquid.  While I was there I had a look at the onions under the cloches.  They were doing remarkably well but a lot of weed had grown in between them.  I resolved to come back and deal with the weeds later.

The problem with summer cauliflowers is that they are very susceptible to cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae).  In fact summer  cauliflowers are more susceptible than most  to all the brassicae ailments.  The cabbage white caterpillars, that are little green jobs, get into the flowers of the cauliflower and are a devil of a job to get out when they are washed.   As I had such a poor survival rate of winter cauliflowers this year and subsequent poverty of cauliflowers, I resolved to plant some summer ones to compensate.  

I planted the cauliflowers about one foot apart and one foot from the previous row of summer flowering brocolli.  I only wanted one line of summer cauliflowers but it needed special protection

I had a small 5mm mesh net that would do the job really well but I was not sure whether it would cover the row completely.  The plastic piping supports were put in every two feet -I find that this is a convenient spacing that prevents the net sagging in the middle.  When I put the net over the supports, I found that it fitted very well and giving the cauliflowers enough room to develop free from cabbage white butterflies.  

I weeded and hoed the Early Onward peas then watered them.  They are about 6 inches tall now.  It was very dry and when I started hoeing I was creating clouds of soil dust.  Even when the soil was wetted there was still  a lot of dust.  Eventually I gave up the hoeing and did not do any more.  

I watered the dwarf French beans and the runner beans.  Now comes the worrying bit.  There is likely to be frosts this week on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.  The beans may well survive this weather but they will probably be nipped back a bit.  I hope they are not too affected.  The potatoes are well up and the plants are developing well so they may well be affected by the frost too.  I will try to earth them up a little more tomorrow.  

I took the cloches off the onions and weeded around them carefully.  As I had disturbed them a little, I gave the onions a good dose of comfrey liquid.  The person that designed cloches that have the plastic stuck to the supports should be congratulated on producing something that is particularly difficult to use.  Getting the wire to stick into the ground with any kind of precision is futile and trying to prevent the plastic from sagging is equally as difficult.  However, I did eventually return the cloches to their original positions and moved on to weed the carrots.  

The carrots are under an enviromesh cover and this had to be moved back before I could weed.  It is easier than you think to do and I weeded carefully along the rows.  I watered on comfrey liquid and then recovered them.  

Afterwards, I went round generally watering things because of this very dry weather.  

Good looking allotment

Lime Hawk moth. 

I have now weeded the whole of the allotment and I must admit that it looks quite good. I have dug all the green manure into the brassica bed and limed it. It is all ready for me to put the brassica seedlings in. I will plant them and water in with comfrey and worm tea mixture next weekend.
I planted out the runner beans with a terra preta type mixture of charcoal, blood fish and bone, comfrey, worm tea and sugar (molases). They seem to like this. Anyway it does not seem to be doing them any harm. I was thinking of putting some bush beans under the canes but this is pointless. Every time I plant something under the beans it performs very badly or dies. This year I am going to leave it free of plants and see how the runners perform. I have planted Aintree and Red Rum. Both have charcoal under them so there will be no comparison to see whether the charcoal has had any effect. I dont mind because I think that it will anyway and I have enough other experiments on the go to compare. I will talk about these later.

I went along weeding the sweet peas tying them up as I went. The poached egg plant that I planted as a companion plant seems to be liking the charcoal because it is very big this year. Several of the plants have died or are on their last legs because they were affected by the cold winter(they were planted in October). I have some more to replace them though. Most of the plants are growing very well and I have had to tie them up three times.
The lupins planted as nitrogen fixers are growing well. I will let them flower as they are the garden variety. I just want to see what colours they will produce.

The tulips flowered very well and now have dropped their petals. I will take them out later and separate out all the large bulbs. The small ones I will grow on in pots and replant the large bulbs.

The garlic and the onions still seem to be surviving even though I think that they might be affected by the dreded onion fly. I am hoping that the very cold winter has affected them and they will not eat all of my onions. I weeded inbetween them with the onion hoe - a very useful tool. I was thinking of putting some chicken pellets on them as well but I haven't yet.

Now this is important and something to contemplate Tone. I thought that several of the broad beans had not germinated. Now, I could have replanted because I still have some in the packet (which I will plant elsewhere), however all of them seem to have germinated now. It goes to show that you need to wait and see...

It cannot be the terra preta so it is probably the mychorrhizal fungi that is making the sweet cicerly grow so big. I want the mychorrhiza to infect the rhubarb so that I get better stems but it does not seem to have the same effect on the rhubarb. But remember the broad beans Tone. You might be surprised.

Potatoes are growing well. They did get caught by the late frosts this year but I have been hoeing them up with a vengence so they were not badly affected. Before hoeing up, I put some of the terra preta charcoal mix along the rows. I hoed up with the three pronged cultivator tool. I bought a completely metal one last year and it is ideal for hoeing up the potatoes. Loads of pot marigold seedlings were growing in the potatoes so I took them out and put them in a line down the side of this plot. I should have planted them with mychorrhizal fungi but I didn't so they are really only for decoration. Nice yellow plants anyway.

Strawberries are growing well. I do hope noone pinches them when they start to fruit because they are right by the trackway. Am I being selfish? I do love to eat them straight from the plants though. They will come in the next few weeks unless the frost has killed the flowers. I must admit the Thompson's Turkish Delight - if that is their name, are much bigger than the Cambridge. I think that they are bigger plants anyway but they were planted with both charcoal mix and mychorrhizal fungi.

I have planted a line of red iceburg lettuce next to the strawberries. For every plant I have put a beer trap in a plastic cup to keep the slugs off. They are infinitely better than slug pellets and they catch - or these ones have- great numbers of both slugs and snails. I was quite supprised when I checked them. I will leave them until they become very stale and then add them to the charcoal mix.

I have enviromesh over the carrots althought they are Fly Away. It is a bit of a bind having to take it off to weed but it does pay dividens when you crop them. I took the mesh off - or one side of it - so that I could weed them. They looked very sparse when I had completed the weeding. However, I always plant too many and never seem to have time to thin them out so I get far too many small to medium sized roots. This year, after sowing them very thinly, I am hoping to get much bigger roots or that is the theory. Similarly with the parsnips. Last year I got some really good ones but they were just average size for me. This year I planted thinly and I will continue to thin them out so that I get some really big ones.

The beetroot are fine and that is a good thing because they have been devastated in the previous two years by slugs. I have put two beer traps down now to keep them off. It seems to be working well.

I did not think that I would, but remarkably, I have raspberries. Even the ones that I planted in the winter have buds and probably will have fruit. I may be disappointed but I don't think so. The ones that I planted last year seem to be really growing well. They did have mychorrhizal fungi but no charcoal. I love raspberries straight from the bush - there is nothing better in the world.

I planted out three rows of Early Onward peas close to the path. I put the thick wire ends in with the silver birch poles tied in with garden wire. I will put chicken wire around them to grow up and if they go over the chicken wire, like they did last year, I will use string to keep them upright tied to the birch poles. I will put the poles every two feet and tie in the chicken wire with garden wire.

I put terra preta charcoal under half the peas so, as I said earlier, I will be able to see if there is any difference between the ends of the rows.

I have a few good winter cauliflowers. I just wish they would come a bit quicker because I need the ground to put another row of Early Onward and Hurst Green Shaft peas in. I will look at them at the weekend and take out as many cauliflowers as I can. They do have a little clubroot so I will take them home and put them into the green bin rather than put them onto the compost heap. A good year for cauliflowers this year.

The overflow potatoes are doing as well as I expected on the new "council" soil. The soil in this part of the allotment was replaced by the council because they found that it was polluted with some foul chemical. The trouble is that they replaced the soil with some very infertile soil that looked more like subsoil than top soil. Still that is by the by. I thought poor soil ... Ah! grapes. I took my two grapes down and planted them in this soil. The black one is thriving but the white one died and I have taken out. I need to put supports in for the black grape - well I wasn't going to do anything with them until I saw that they were growing.

On the same soil, can you believe, I have planted some climbing french beans. The soil might be rubbish but I thought that this would be a good test for the terra preta charcoal mix. I have planted each of the beans with a good dose of charcoal. We will see if this has an effect. I was also going to plant some bush beans in the middle without the charcoal and see if there is any difference. The slugs are eating some of the plants so I put in several new beer traps to try to stop them. We will see if they are as effective as the other ones.

I cropped the 5 lines of comfrey and put them in the digester butt. I am hoping that it will provide a lot of comfrey liquid because I really need some more now. The worm butt is really producing a lot of worm tea now so this is being used instead of comfrey at the moment.

The allotment secretary asked me to dig out a mound of compost which was infested with couch grass and bindweed. He did not have to ask me twice. I saw what the old tenant of that allotment had put on his compost. Dug it out together with some of the couch grass and put it into my pallet bins. Towards the bottom of the heaps was some fantastic compost. I put that in the bins as well. Now I have three 4 foot cubed bins full of really good compost. In the first I am going to put black courgettes, in the second I will put ridge cucumbers and in the third I will put pumpkins. However, if the squashes come that planting arrangement may alter and the courgettes may get planted somewhere else.

I bought some new rhubarb this year called Champagne. My old rhubarb, which is quite a late one, I found on the allotment when I took it over 27 years ago. I have no idea what variety it is so I decided to buy a new variety and see if it does any better than the old one. I really want an earier one. I planted the Champagne with mychorrhizal fungi but no charcoal. Having said that, I did also put a load of good well rotted compost in the planting hole with them. I am expecting great things from them but not this year.

The Jerusalem Artichokes are growing well, which means that someone will be annoyed on the allotment because they always lean over the carpark. They are hemmed in by the compost bins and the new next door neighbour's shed so they really are under control - almost. They are a really serious vegetable though.

Well that's it for the moment. I will be busy planting out the brassicas, more peas and the curbits as soon as I can. That may not be as soon as necessary things being as they are...
Never mind.
Writing this has taken my mind off other things and is good therupy Tone.