Seed sowing and transplanting.

Spent most of today sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings.  I have put the Mammoth onions into large pots to grow on.  The Vision onions were put into smaller pots because they will be put into the allotment sooner.  Vision is a good storing onion and can last throughout the winter if they are treated correctly.  The large onions will have to be eaten quite quickly because they will not store very well.

I transplanted some turnips into sectioned trays.  This is the first time that I have done this because I usually plant straight into the allotment soil and thin out.  I am going to try to get some big turnips this year so that I can give one to my daughter when she is reading "The Enormous Turnip".

Apart from this, last year they were particularly well eaten by cabbage root flies so I want to see if I can grow some better ones this year.

I have sown both swede and kohlrabi into sectioned trays for similar reasons.  The celeriac seedlings have been  transplanted into sectioned trays as have the second sowing of celery.

More lettuce and All the Year Round cauliflowers were sown for succession. Regardless of the fact that I have far too many already.

Other brassicas sown today are calabrese and "Trafalgar" Brussel sprouts.  I still need to sow the winter cauliflowers and the broccoli.

I have sown some French climbing beans to see if I can get an early crop.  Most would say that it is far to early for French bean sowing but I collected my own seed last year and have a surfeit  I can experiment with.  Similarly, I have kept my own runner beans and can experiment with an early sowing of these.

I have also sown several different herbs including dill, marjoram, sage, basil, cumin, etc.  I am not too sure whether they will come very well because they were last years seed being sold off at half price in the garden center.

This has filled the greenhouse again.  However, the potatoes that are chitting will be planted soon and the early sowing of "Golden Acre" cabbages can be taken out to harden off.  I have some early Duke of York potatoes which I will plant tomorrow.  This will allow some room for new seedlings to be transplanted.  I will only plant more pea seeds when the present ones are planted in the allotment.  This should give me a good succession of peas.

 The parsnips will go in tomorrow.  So too will the sweet pea seedlings.

It is a busy time of the year.

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.  

Today I will be mostly weeding.

At this time of the year there is a bit of a lull in the things to do department on the allotment.  I have transplanted some red Brussel sprouts into 3 inch pots.  I am not too sure what name they go under because they were given to me.

The celeriac has grown quite a bit in the greenhouse.  I gave some to Mick.  Tony, who had given me them, said they were bigger than his.  I will leave mine in the greenhouse for a little bit longer and then plant them out next to the leeks in the onion bed.

I have finally got the French beans to germinate.  Why they were such hard work I don't know.

 I took up two trays of lettuce to the allotment but I did not plant them out.  I will do that tomorrow.  I pricked out the new sowing of lettuce into sectioned trays.  I have far too many but I will be able to give a lot away.  It is amazing the good will you generate when you give people little plants.  I am going to do this a lot more from now on.  I have planted some more brassicae seed just in case.  One or two plants have been eaten by slugs.  The Nematodes have not come yet.

I am not going to buy them from Unwins again.  They may be cheaper but I would rather pay more and get them delivered when I want them.  I am going to email them to see where they are. WHERE ARE MY NEMASLUG NEMATODES UNWINS???

I planted another line of Woden beetroot and then took the enviromesh off the carrots and weeded them.  I was going to thin the carrots but I don't think that they need to be thinned yet.  I did sow them quite thinly so they will not suffer from another week without being thinned.  I sowed a line of rainbow Swiss chard.  I will probably only use the 'baby' leaves in salad because I don't really like chard cooked.

I thinned and weeded the parsnips.  I have got them about 6 inches apart now and I might decide to thin them even more later.

Two potatoes were coming up in the parsnips so I dug down with a trowel but did not find them.  They will continue to irritate me.

The new line of spinach has germinated and is growing well.  This is another leaf I would rather eat raw than cooked.   Tony had given me a few Blue Lake climbing French beans and I used these to replace the ones that the slugs got because UNWINS HAVE NOT SENT ME THE NEMASLUG NEMATODES YET.  This is one place where I am definitely going to put them if they ever arrive.

Hoed and weeded the peas and the squashes.  The squashes are surviving even though there has been several very cold nights.  Went down to the brassicas and hoed all of these.  It is a bit of a chore because I had to take the nets off but it isn't that bad and the nets went back on really quickly.  While the nets were off I gave the cabbage, cauliflowers and the broad beans a good feed with comfrey liquid.

When I had finished all of this it was tea break time and I toddled off to make a cup of tea.  I had to walk over to the shop because I did not have any milk. Sat down and poured a cup of tea then had a snooze.  What is life if full of care there is no time to stand and stare?  No time to stand beneath the boughs and stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.  No time to see, in broad daylight streams full of stars like skies at night.  No time to turn at Beauty's glance and watch her feet - how they can dance  No time to wait till her mouth can enrich that smile her eyes began.  A poor life this, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare - or at least have a snooze.  You and me both William Henry.

Really I should have gone home but I wanted to get at least one row of sweet peas tied up because they were in danger of flopping over.  Once I had started, I realised they were not as bad as I thought.  I did do one line but I left the others for tomorrow.  It started to rain .

Tomorrow, I will mainly finish the sweet peas, plant the lettuce and possibly hoe the potatoes up again.  The potatoes don't need hoeing up again but it is a good way of weeding them.  I have cut all the stolons off the strawberries so they put all their energy into making big fruit.  I hope that I get some big fruit now.

I have cropped two lettuces, some rocket and spinach leaves for dinner today.   Picked, washed and eaten within an hour.  Lovely jubbly...

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.