Digging over the sweet pea bed

I dug over most of the new sweet pea bed today mixing in the horse manure.  The only parts that I did not dig were where where the manure pile is and where the celeriac and leeks are.  I wasn't going to dig any manure into this plot but I had the manure so I used it.

I will get some more manure for the new pea and bean bed.

I watered the leeks with a little comfrey liquid manure to encourage them to bulk up a little.  I planted them late to avoid the leek miner fly and they really need to bulk up now so that I can use them.  The celeriac is big so does not need any extra fertiliser.

I dug up four Brussel sprouts plants to take home.  Most of the Brussel sprouts are over one metre tall and have grown really well.  Due to the warm weather in autumn a lot of the lower sprouts have opened out but the plants still have a lot of usable sprouts which I will take off to cook. The rest of the plant will be put into the big green compost bin.  There was some evidence of club root although I might be misinterpreting cabbage root fly Delia radicum damage.  Regardless, the most effective way of dealing with pests and diseases is to remove the potentially infected material and put it in the recycling bin to be composted well.  


I watered the winter cauliflowers with liquid comfrey fertiliser.  It might be a little early to encourage these to put on growth because they are susceptible to very cold weather.  This year they seem to have kept their leaves and not been cut back as they usually are.  Maybe I will be lucky.   


I have put one dustbin over the Rheum rhaponticum to force some of the leaves.  The Victorians used to put manure around the forcing bins to warm the soil through heat generated by decomposition.  I will not be able to use all the manure on the sweet pea bed so I used some around the rhubarb bins.  It means that the rhubarb will  be fertilised this year.  I may even put some pigeon manure around them - in very small doses.  I have two more dust bins and an old black Darlek compost bin that I can use to force the rhubarb.  I will put these over the rhubarb tomorrow.  


Any manure that is left over will be put around the blackcurrants.  I will feed the Ribes nigrum with liquid comfrey fertiliser  before I put the manure around them.  Two of the plants I cut back hard because of big bud mite Cecidophyopsis ribis have died so I will have to replace them with cuttings.  I will plant them with some inoculated charcoal and mychorrhizal fungi.  


After the high winds we had in early January, the roofing felt has come off one of the sheds.  I will need to replace this as soon as possible so that water does not get into the shed.  

Sowing seeds at the beginning of the season.

   The season has begun and seed must be sown.  I am growing big onions and leeks this year and they need a very long growing season.  They will be sown tomorrow and so to will some of the tomato seeds.

I am not sure yet whether I will sow the seed in the sectioned seed trays or just in a pan.  I can put the pan next to the hot water tank inside the house to germinate the seeds.  Onion seeds can germinate at 0^oC so I will put them in a tray and keep them in a warm room.   The tomatoes will be put into a pan and left next to the hot water tank because they will need extra heat.   I will be using the New Horizons peat free compost and putting the trays or pans into clear plastic bags.  The seeds will germinate in any plastic bag if they are removed when the seeds have germinated.  White plastic bags let a lot of light through and these can be left on for a little while.

When the onions and leeks have germinated, I will put them out in the cold greenhouse  and when they get to a reasonable size pot them up into 3 inch pots.  I will try to put them out around March time and cover them with enviromesh to keep the onion miner fly Phytomyza gymnostoma off them.  It will be particularly prevalent in late March and early April so I will have to cover from the time I plant out until early July.

I am going to try to get some very big onions and leeks this year.

I may plant the oca in pots as well because this is another vegetable that needs a very long growing season.  I only got little tubers last season and I would really like to get some reasonable sized ones this season.

Sieved some more soil on the potato bed and mixed in the horse and pigeon manure.  Really, it was too wet to dig and the ground was getting a little too compacted and muddy.  This is when compaction could cause problems.  I am not too concerned because all the soil will eventually get dug over to two spits deep and any compaction will disappear.  I am keeping off the area of soil that I have finished digging over.  There is no reason to walk over; if I do I sink leaving footprints that just fill with water.

The ground will have to be firmed before seed is sown. Seeds don't seem to germinate very well in too friable soil.

I have two dustbins full of comfrey liquid which might sound good, however I would like to use the bins to cover the rhubarb Rheum rhaponticum so that I can get a good early crop this year.  I might have to get another big bin to put the comfrey liquid into.  I don't really want to waste it because it has taken me a long time to amass this amount of comfrey.

Might do photographs tomorrow.  I want photographs for each month for the whole year.  The allotment is looking very untidy at the moment but that is not unusual for this time of the year.  Plants are not really growing very much at the moment and this leads to a very dull allotment.
                                    

Now its just weeding and feeding

Not that you can feed plants because they make their own food using carbon dioxide and water in the process we call photosynthesis.

This is why I always  write that I am putting fertiliser on the plants.  Sometimes I will use the word nutrients but whatever you use it is not food.

I went along the rows weeding and hoeing and got down as far as the leeks.  I would really like to put some more leeks in but there is no room.   I may have to take out some of the onions that have been affected by the onion miner fly.  This will give me more room for the leeks.  I thought that I had lost some leek seed that I had sown in the greenhouse.  Actually I had used the pot to transplant a celeriac into.  I  have put the celeriac outside now to harden off and the leek seeds have germinated and grown in the pot with the celeriac.  I was just about to weed the celeriac pot when I noticed that these were the lost leeks.

They will be transplanted into 3 inch pots, grown on and planted out at the end of June.

I have another oca! That makes three now.  I know that it is a bit sad to be so excited about three oca plants but, in my defence, it is the first time I have grown them.  I am a very traditional gardener and all these new vegetables seem to have crept up and overtaken me without me really being aware of them.  This will change.

Oca has a leaf not unlike black medic Medicago lupulina.  Black medic is a funny name for a plant with yellow flowers but I think the black refers to the seed.  It seems that the latin name refers to where the Greeks got it from and its flowers resemblance to hops.

I planted some more turnips, however I planted these in the pea bed because there was no room in the brassicae bed.  I'm not too sure whether I am happy with this because it is Brassica rapa var. rapifera -  the Japanese turnip and I am sowing it out of the strict rotation.  Still, I am interested in whether it does actually taste like melon or not and if it does, I want lots of it.  


I took out all the rocket because it was going to seed.  Its leaves were starting to look like lace because of the damage by the flea beetle.  I will resow later but now I will put some more spinach and Hamburg parsley in.  


I wanted to sow some more radish but I cannot for the life of me find the packet of seed.  I have tried planting in a pot so that I do not have to trape down to the allotment every time I want radish for salad.  The planting radish in a pot was not successful and, to top it all, it seems that I have lost the packet of seed as well.  I will look a little more carefully in the greenhouse today.  

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.

Seed sowing is well underway

I have spent most of today sowing seeds in the greenhouse.  I have planted about nine trays of Early Onward peas.  You might think that this is a time consuming way of planting peas, however I find that this is the only way to protect the peas from the very voracious pigeons that inhabit our allotment site.  They will leave the peas alone  when they have germinated and formed their roots.

Most of the brassicas I am going to grow this year have been sown.  These include Trafalgar and Foremost Brussel sprouts,  Golden Acre cabbage, Early sprouting broccoli and calabrese.  I have still to sow the late purple sprouting broccoli and the cauliflower - both winter and summer.

I still need to prick out the rest of the onions, the leeks and the tomatoes.  I will begin to do this tomorrow.

I took the parsnip seeds to the allotment with the intention of planting two rows.  Well needless to say, I did not plant them but they will not suffer if I wait a while until the soil warms up a little more.

Seed planting

I have planted some Musselburgh leeks (Allium ampeloprasum v. porrumand)  and a mixture of old lettuce (Lactuca sativa) seed.  I will sow some more later in the month and during March. The tomatoes  (Solanum lycopersicum L. var. lycopersicum) I sowed last week are Totem. They are a dwarf stocky variety and I will be growing them on the staging in the greenhouse. 

The importance of the Montezuma method.

The weather was relatively warm today.  I actually had to take my coat off. 

I finished putting in the posts for the sweet peas and runner beans.  I need four more posts to fill the plot.  I am not sure whether the sweet pea seedlings are going to survive but, if they don’t, I will get some more seed and replant in February.  There is plenty of time for them to develop into very good plants.  It is just that they will not come into bloom as early as the October sown ones.  It might even be good to have later ones because that will give me a longer flowering season. 

I leveled the soil between the posts with the rake and the beds look very good now.  Two people have asked whether I was planting seed because the beds look like seed beds. 

Needless to say, nothing will be sown in the soil until late March at the earliest.  There is some talk about there being another bout of very cold weather and I will not be surprised if there is.

I took out some of the leeks and I am going to use them in some vegetable soup that I am going to make tomorrow.  I don’t know what it will taste like because I am using up some of the carrots, potatoes, parsnips and onions to make a good mixture.  I will zap it all with the hand blender and have it for dinner. 

I began to turn over the brassicae bed again and dug some deep trenches to bury the blackcurrant bushes that I did not want. I went down two spits (a spit is one length of a spade blade).  There was clay at the bottom of the trench because I don’t think that I have dug this area since I had the allotment 30 odd years ago.  This part of the allotment always had the blackcurrants on from the earliest days.   I cut the branches up with a pair of secateurs so that they would fit neatly at the bottom of the trench. The roots went in the trench too but only after I had knocked off all the soil.  I went through the remaining black currant bushes with a little more care to see if I could find any more big bud.  There was surprisingly little, although I did take off several suspicious looking buds and put them at the bottom of the trench.

The trench started to fill with water, which indicates the importance the Montezuma (see the other posts on Montezuma method) method of raising the beds for draining the water off the allotment.  I think that I will ask Fred if I can have some of his brushwood from his big pile to put at the bottom of tomorrow’s trenches.  The spring was flowing peacefully at the corner of the top bed.  It is not affecting any of the plants but I am worried that the water may be leaching out nutrients from the soil here.    

On top of the blackcurrant branches went a mixture of turfs, leaves and lawn mowings.  The soil then when back into the trench. 

I don’t really want this soil to get too rich because I will be planting Brussel sprouts here in May time.  If the ground has too many nutrients, the Brussel sprouts will ‘blow’ and not have the tight button shaped structure that good Brussel sprouts should have.  I don’t know why but the Brussels, winter cauliflowers and purple sprouting broccoli were giving off a horrible cabbage smell today.  I think that some of them have succumbed to the very cold weather (lowest temperature on the allotment was -16^oC).   

I used the rake to level across the bed and I think that I have lost the dip in the middle.  I had my camera so I should have taken a photograph.  However, I had not finished the bed and it looks untidy where I have walked all over it.  It was very wet all over the allotment and some would say that you should not walk on soil this wet.  Tough, I could not waste a warm day like today so I soldiered on regardless.  If the ground is forked over where you have been walking then there is little damage done.  I suppose that this is one of the advantages of raised beds – you can avoid treading on them.  Nevertheless, I cannot be doing with dibbling about in tiny areas of soil.  I don’t do raised beds, I do raised allotments.  So tomorrow loads more leaves and grass mowings to raise the brassicae bed up even more. 

I remembered that I had lots of seeds in the shed and brought them home to go through them.  I am not too sure how good they will be so I think that I will just keep them in reserve at the moment.  I may just use them as a green manure, sowing them and then digging them in when they have developed a little. 

The seed that I have already are. 

·         Chives  Not germinated

·         French Bean Blue Lake Germinated

·         Beetroot Wodan F1 Hybrid

·         Beetroot Boltardy Germinated

·         Onion Bedfordshire Champion .  I think that I will plant these tomorrow in the same way as the Ailsa Craig. Only three germinated.  

·         Broccoli Sprouting Redhead Germinated

·         Broccoli Summer Purple Sprouting (Wok Brocc) Germinated

·         Broad Bean Aquadulce Claudia

·         Broad Bean Bunyard’s Exhibition

·         Nasturtium Tom Thumb

·         Dwarf Bean Delinel Not germinated

·         Courgette Black Beauty  Germinated

·         Runner Bean Streamline Not germinated

·         Runner Bean White Apollo  Germinated

·         Carrot Royal Chantenay Red (Two packets)  Germinated

·         Carrot Early Nantes

·         Spinach  Germinated

·         Cauliflower Chassiron F1 Hybrid  Germinated

·         Brussel Sprout Topline  Germinated

·         Squash Winter Harrie  Germinated

·         Corn Salad Cavallo  Germinated

·         Rocket  Germinated 

·         Chicory Variegata di Castelfranco 

It’s amazing what you find when you start looking!  I wonder what else is buried in that shed…