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.
                                    

Partial successes

I have to admit that I am not a very good Florence fennel grower.  I have never been successful with it.  At the moment I have six plants growing - or should I say surviving? I would really like to know what I am doing wrong.  It shows you that, regardless of how long you have been growing vegetables, you still have things to learn.

I am really pleased with them but I would have liked to have more.

Together with the climbing French beans, which have been devastated by the slugs, I am not doing as well as I would like.

Still, without some partial successes it would not be gardening.

I still can't get the climbing French beans to start to grow well.  I think that it is the coolish June weather that is holding them back.  I might put cloches over the cucumbers to help them over this cold weather.  However, they are doing remarkably well and may not need them.

A big success has been the oca.  I now have five plants which I am very proud of.  I hope they taste good after all the effort I have put into them.  Five out of six is great but I am still looking to see if the sixth one is going to poke its head through.

The onions are growing well but I think I may have taken the barriers off too soon.  Some of them are showing definite onion fly damage.  I am watering with rainwater and diluted comfrey liquid so they are fairly big plants.  I hope that the bulbs swell towards the end of the month.

Peas are beginning to flower and fruit now.  There are not as many pea pods as I would like, which shows that it does not matter how big the plants grow if they do not produce the crop then it is only a partial success.
There are no failures on my 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.