Plants and taps

On Sunday Jean sowed the mange tout peas in pots and put them into the greenhouse to germinate. If we sowed the seeds in the ground the mice would dig them up and we like to grow seeds on in pots before we plant them out, which is just what we did with the spinach. Our first eleven plants have gone out, I think we'll sow some more seeds soon to keep us in a constant flow of young spinach leaves. At home Jean sowed the plum tomato seeds. They seem to take at least a couple of weeks to germinate. We'll grow a few plants in a grow-bag in the greenhouse and it's getting warm enough to put them out fairly soon.

I bought a new tap for the allotment today. I had to take out the valves that stop water returning through the tap because the water pressure from our tanks is low and any resistance to the flow will make a big difference. Since the tap is not used on mains water I don't need the valves.

Crops away

The onions went in today. A full row each of white and red onions. The ground was very dry - every forecast promise of rain has come to nothing. The last rain was mid March an not much at that. I watered the onion sets in and watered everything else. We have already used nearly a quarter of our water. There is some rain forecast next week, but we'll see what happens. I haven't been so interested in the weather since I used to go flying.

Jean cut the first rhubarb today. It smells wonderful.

Carrot bed

A bit cold and grey, with some mistiness from time to time, so a bit of work needed to get the blood moving. I cut up an old door into four parts and screwed them together into a carrot bed. The sides should be high enough to keep carrot fly out, but we can always put a fleece lid over it. I put some earth and the contents of last-year's grow bag into the frame to improve the soil a little. I also trimmed and tidied up the little benches we use around the site, usually to have something to work on at a reasonable height. Lastly I watered the carrot bed, the asparagus and the broad beans. The surface of the soil is just dust and although it is damp below the surface it dries very quickly if you turn the soil. We need rain, but none is forecast. Jean raked the ground ready for our onion sets and then weeded about half the plot.

Right on cue

Last year our parsnips were superb. They were big, though a bit stumpy, tasty and not at all woody. We grew them by chitting the seeds on damp paper before planting the ones that sprouted into fibre pots. Once the plants were big enough these pots were then planted with their bases cut off to let the root grow on into the soil. All of this is because parsnips are hard to germinate and don't like having their roots disturbed. Planting plants out rather than sowing seed gives them a better start and avoids the disturbance from thinning. This process worked well so we are repeating it, albeit with some changes: We stated a few weeks later, we're planting the chitted seeds into cardboard tubes rather than fibre pots and they will go into the ground, tube and all, a bit quicker. The changes might help to produce less stumpy roots because there should be less root disturbance.

Last year the chitting process took about eight days and, eight days after starting, roots have appeared on half a dozen seeds. I wasn't too sure about how long it would take because we're using a different variety this year. The chitted and tubed tubers will go straight to the greenhouse.

The strong winds have died down and today the sun is shining down from a clear blue sky. The air is still cool but the forecast is for that to warm up too. Jean is sowing beetroot and tomato seeds. The beetroot, parsnips, sweet peas and some teasels for our garden will go up to the greenhouse to bring them on. We have had so little rain over the past month that the ground is dry and hard on the surface, so a day of heavy, warm rain would be welcome.

More seeds

I've taken a look at this blog for this time last year and we are starting things a little later than last year. We intended to do this to give some stuff a better start and so things got less of a shock when they went out. Today thirty sweet peas were sown in pots today, some for home but some for the allotment. We started the chitting the parsnip seeds on wet paper again. It worked well last year, so we will try it again. It is a different variety this year: White Gem, last year we had Patriot. We have a huge number of seeds in the packet which probably means we will get very few to germinate. Our spinach is sprouting well, so it will go up to the greenhouse shortly. The weather forecast is for a colder spell next week but also for some rain which we badly need.

Beans out

So the beans are out. The forecast frost didn't happen. The ground was already dug so the broad beans went out into two nice rows. If these do well they will be the only ones we plant this year, last year we had far too many beans.

Yesterday I wanted to take more photos, but the battery on my camera let me down, so today I include a photo of the rhubarb for no reason other than I like it.

Spring

A really lovely day drew us up to the allotment. Rob was there tidying up and Gary had been up with Rob's Rotavator, so his plot looks ready to go. The broad beans in the greenhouse are really ready to plant out, but there is a frost forecast so we'll leave them another day or two.

We dug over the plots for broad beans and where we want to plant some spinach. I moved a few garlic plants that were going to get trampled. The newly planted garlic has also appeared, so we should be fully vampire-proof this year.

The rhubarb is bursting out, though one of Rob's rhubarb plants is much further on than ours. Last year I covered some of the rhubarb to try to force it, but it didn't seem to make much difference, so this year I left it alone. We tidied up and weeded the strawberry beds, where I found a spiny plant that looks like a new gooseberry plant. I planted it near the gooseberries and I'll see what is grows into. The gooseberries and blackcurrants are bursting into leaf. We weeded the asparagus bed, but no signs of life there yet.