Normal Service Has Been Restored

Enough of my trials with the red ants (the bites are much better, thanks for asking....), let's get back to matters vegetabular (have I just coined a new word?)

It's been chucking it down here since I last went (and got all bitten) so as there were some bits of blue in the sky today I thought I'd best grab the opportunity to get down the road to do some weeding and harvest some stuff. The last pictures of the plopment proper were on 8 July which is some time ago now. So, behold the jungle that has appeared since last you looked:


All the new potatoes have been dug up now and, delicious though they were, the yield was quite staggeringly poor. In the vast majority of cases, I only got 2, maybe 3, spuds per plant! Barely worth it. I'm hoping for much better things from my Desiree main crops.

I'm growing quite a few new things this year that I've not tried before - Butternut Squash is one. You grow them like cucumbers, up poles, but I believe pollination is a bit tricky - it says on the packet that you can aid pollination by using a paintbrush or just sticking your finger into one flower and then into another to act as a surrogate bee or bug or whatever. I've found, though, that I've only so far had one flower open at a time! This is just an experiment, though. We'll see what happens.



Another veg I'm growing this year for the first time is the Pattypan Squash or, to give it its more formal title, "Early White Bush Scallop Summer Squash". Originally grown by native Americans for hundreds of years, it's now very popular in modern American vegetable patches but little grown over here. You grow them just like courgettes and I started by sowing just three seeds but all three germinated so I didn't bother sowing any more (I only need to grow enough to feed the 2 of us and if it's anything like courgettes....need I say more?)


But, look, I harvested my first squash today! Well, okay, so it was the only one on the 3 plants but I'm hopeful there'll be more! In the picture the squash is next to (some of) today's harvest of Cobra Climbing French Beans and another new arrival, Yellow French Beans.

My courgettes are coming along:


As are the cucumbers:


The Calabrese/broccoli:


And the Sweetcorn is starting to develop its flowers (or what passes for flowers in sweetcorn-world):


The two rows of Resistafly Carrots seem happy enough, but it's hard to tell until you dig some up, so we'll see later if they stand up to their billing:


The lettuce hedge is as succulent as ever. One thing I can say for my plopment is that it grows terrific lettuces. Just after I took this picture I tasted a few of the leaves from the salad bowls (frilly bright green plants in the picture) and, sadly, they were starting to bolt (I'd suspected as much) and the leaves were so bitter I had to spit them out, so I removed them. Fortunately I'd brought with me half a dozen new lettuce seedlings so they got popped into the vacant space.


The fox trampoline was starting to look a bit full and as I'd not weeded underneath the mesh since planting the brassicas in there, I figured it was time to do it.


And this is showing just how big the brassicas have got (I think we're looking at mainly Savoy Cabbage here and possibly some Brussels Sprouts):


The Cosmos that Sylvia planted when she had the top of my plot has flowered beautifully this year. I decided to leave them as the colours are so vivid.


And, finally, this year's competition on the site is for the best scarecrow (last year was tallest sunflower and the year before that was something to do with sweetpeas, I think). Anyway, I have enough to be getting on with without having to think about designing and constructing a scarecrow so won't be entering, but other people on site are and scarecrows are gradually appearing. The competition is going to be judged sometime during the week of 10-16 August (which is, apparently, National Allotment Week) but this one went up this afternoon (all 10ft of it!) and I think it's fabulous - such an easy design and so effective! Bit early for Hallowe'en but what the heck, I wish I'd thought of it now!!

Damn - October already?

Oh, hey, look I KNOW I've not done an update since the beginning of September and I KNOW there's no pictures with this one but that's just the way it goes sometimes, doesn't it?!? I promise I'll take the camera next time (probably later on this week) and just take a whole bunch of pix.

First things first - just how mental is this weather? Just after I last posted it got cold, then we definitely did have an Indian Summer for about a coupla weeks which was most welcome, then it got a bit colder, and now it's raining but unseasonably warm!! Every time I go to the plopment I have to take a change of clothes because I don't know if it'll stay the same from one hour to the next....

Right then, to business. With the help of The Husband, we've managed to clear the beds that S dug while she was working the plot which meant, rather sadly I suppose, that I've had to dig out the 2 rhubarb plants she put in (mostly because I don't think I'm going to be growing rhubarb and, if I did, it wouldn't be where she'd planted them) and about a gazillion self-replicating strawberry plants (I AM going to be having a strawberry bed but, again, not where she'd put them and probably a different variety), so I'm starting with a clean slate. Also we took out about 10 pounds of Desiree potatoes! We ate the bigger ones but I have to say that I'm about to chuck out the little fiddly ones that are left because not only are we eating hers, but also all the ones that I planted, so we're swimming in spuds!

The top half of the plot is going to be mostly dedicated to fruit so, to this end, we've planted two different varieties of Blueberry bush - 'Jersey' and 'Duke' - one is early fruiting, the other later, and I have a 'Patriot' on order. I've no idea what acidity the soil is so we just played it safe, got 2 smallish (40 litre) bags of ericaceous compost, dug big holes, filled them with the compost then stuck a blueberry bush in each, watered them in and are hoping for the best.

I have many other things on order - 3 Blackcurrant bushes (Wellington XXX), 2 Gooseberry bushes (Langley Gage), 2 Raspberry varieties (Autumn Bliss and Glen Prosen), Strawberries (Aromel), and 1 dwarf Cherry tree (Maynard). I'm also looking into apples and pears but they need to be on very dwarfing root stock and we've not decided what varieties we want yet. I've decided against Redcurrants because we don't eat them now so god knows what we'd do with a bushfull of them.

Yesterday, while it was dry, I took the opportunity of planting 200 overwintering onion sets, consisting of 100 'Swift', 50 red 'Electric', and 50 yellow 'Shenshyu' varieties. I also put in cloves of Solent White and some other kind of garlic whose name I've forgotten.

Last week I cleared the Sweetcorn (as they've now finished) and weeded where the French Beans were (leaving their roots in the ground as they fix nitrogen into the soil) and put in 6 red cabbage, 4 spring cabbage and 12 sprouting broccoli seedlings for brassica fartiness next Spring. We've been eating the Curly Kale (in a fabulous pasta dish which includes bacon, anchovies and chilli, topped with grated fresh parmesan - yum!), and we've had one meal with the Brussels Sprouts, so it's all coming good. Although I do need to find a recipe that uses Chard - any ideas?

My coriander has gone beserk and I'm planning on doing something with the seeds, and the Sorrels are also clambering all over the place - think I'm going to have to thin them for next year. The peppers have done their darndest but none of them turned red. Oh well, I want to grow Chillies next year anyway so may have to rig up some kind of glass frame to go against the shed, into which peppers could go as well.

I think that's is for the time being. I'll put up piccies in the next few days...

I'm expanding!!

I can't believe that it's September already - where did the year go? And when's summer going to arrive? To be honest, I think we've had what little summer we're going to get back in May and June when it was really hot and sunny. The hottest day of the year was 11 May when The Husband and Da were putting up my shed down at the plopment. Oh well, not much we can do about it, perhaps that's the way our weather's going to be from now on - hot and sunny in late spring, and then damp and warm until winter starts hoving into view.

Yes, I'm expanding! Admittedly I've just had a 3 day Royal Visit from the venerable parents-in-law which always involves sitting around and eating a lot, but this year was entwined with sister-in-law's landmark birthday (i.e., one with an '0' at the end) including a big party with people attending from all over the country and, frankly, I'm feeling poisoned from all the food-that's-really-bad-for-you-but-tastes-SO-good plus alcohol that I've been forcing down my neck and now my clothes have mysteriously shrunk, but, more importantly for this blog, I've now taken over the top half of my plopment! Yay!

If you recall when I started posting all this drivel way back when, I told you that I had actually only taken on a half-sized allotment as an old girl, S, had been allocated the top half. Now the occasions when S and I visited at the same time where very few and far between but when we did happen to be there at the same time, she always said that she thought she'd taken on too much, that it was a lot of hard work and she felt a bit overwhelmed. Therefore I knew it would only really be a matter of time before she gave it up. With this in mind I decided to ask the Site Secretary a few weeks ago about the protocol for taking over when S decided she wanted to give up - could I just have it? Or would I have to go to the end of the waiting list? The Secretary said that as I was already working the lower half, then I could automatically have the top half, as and when S decided to jack it in. Annual rental is paid in Spring so I thought I'd have to wait until then but last Wednesday the secretary rang me to say that S had contacted her to say she was giving it up and that she'd taken everything off the plot and out of the ground that she wanted. The secretary said it was now all mine and that I wouldn't have to pay any extra until next Spring because S had already paid until then! So now I'm really excited and daunted at the same time. I can now plan for soft fruit (which I couldn't grow before as I had no room) including proper raspberry and strawberry beds, gooseberries, blueberries, (possibly) rhubarb, a small apple tree (strictly speaking I'm not allowed to plant trees on the plopment but I can't see that a small one, no more than 5 feet high say, can hurt...), Victoria plum tree, etc. But the site is overgrown - mostly with grass I have to say, but still overgrown and will need to be cleared properly, so I'm back to where I was, ground condition-wise, in February this year. I'll have an autumn and winter of digging and weeding ahead. The two pictures (you can click on all the pictures in the blog to make them bigger) show the full length of the plopment taken from the end of S's plot (my existing plot is the bottom half - you can see from where the french beans are growing up bamboo canes? I was growing stuff just in front of that, and then down to the shed - have I explained that properly? oh well, you get the idea hopefully!) I think what I'm going to have to do is clear as much of it as I can and just buy loads of black weed-suppressing plastic to cover the ground until spring. I'm also going to have to look into getting a petrol-driven strimmer as well - a rechargeable cordless one just doesn't have enough power or battery life to do the job, and I really can't manage a full size plot with a pair of garden shears - even doing the half plot was a pain.

So that's my Big News at the moment, but what's happening in the growing half? Sadly, as I suspected, my big, beautiful tomatoes have all contracted blight and have had to go on the bonfire (or will do when it dries out enough to burn stuff). You can't put them on the compost because the spores will survive, and they're too heavy to put in bin bags to take home to go to landfill so I'm going to have to burn them. Like most people, I enjoy a good bonfire but I'm extremely aware of how close to people's houses the allotments are and if I lived there I would be livid at bonfire smoke constantly drifting through my washing, so I'm going to have to time it properly. Actually, as a group of people, the allotmenteers at my site are pretty good about keeping bonfires to an absolute minimum.

I'm digging my way through my second early spuds, Maris Piper. The yield for these has been at least 2 or 3 times that of the Pentland Javelin, but they are prone to scab. Scab is unsightly but doesn't affect the eating quality of the potato once you've peeled them, so while it's a bit of a nuisance, scab's not really that much of a problem.

We've started eating the sweetcorn and it's fantastic! I've got 18 plants and they've all grown beautiful large cobs which we're currently eating for lunch! They're a variety called 'Applause' and they've been really successful.

Oh, hey, look, the sun's just come out - I think I'm going to have to sign off now and shoot out to do some digging, while I can.....

Faster, Higher, Stronger....

It's been almost a month since I last updated the blog which is, perhaps, a little remiss of me, and for which I humbly beg your forgiveness. In my defence, the weather at the end of July deteriorated so I didn't go to the allotment all that much plus the last couple of weeks I've been glued to the telly watching the Olympics. And when I did go to the plopment I seemed to do nothing more than pick French Beans, which I thought was very boring to write about. The running total is - get this - 38.5 pounds of beans. I'm getting sick of them, as are my family, friends, neighbours and complete strangers in the street. In fact anyone who comes anywhere near me will be asked if they want some beans. My freezer is full of them, as is my fridge. There are carrier bags of them sitting on my garage floor.

This is all the more astonishing when you see just how battered and weedy the plants are looking now, but they're still damn well producing! Having said that, though, I think production is tailing off now and hopefully will be finished in a few weeks. It said on the seed packet that Cobra French Beans are a prolific cropper and they're not wrong! I've had getting on for 40 pounds of beans from about 40 plants (planting 2 or 3 to a cane). Whether I plant as many next year remains to be seen. One thing I will change, however, is the shape of the cane structure. The way it is now is traditional but I hadn't realised just how windy it gets at the plopment, and the structure's come apart on more than one occasion. Next year I think I'll put the canes in a more robust teepee-shaped construction which also means I can dot them about the place as well.

All my onions are now out of the ground. Our site secretary recently sent a warning round that the top of the of the allotment site had been hit by Downy Mildew which affects onions. I'm at the bottom end of the site and actually don't know if it affected my onions or not. The leaves were going yellow and falling over, but that's what they do anyway when it's time to harvest them. There's all sorts of ways of harvesting onions including doing stuff like bending over the tops and leaving them in the ground prior to digging them up (not sure what this is supposed to do), or easing them out of the ground with a fork but not pulling them up altogether, and leaving them there for a couple of weeks (I think this is supposed to start the 'stop growing' process). I know you have to let them dry for at least a couple of weeks before you can store them (otherwise you run the risk of them rotting in storage).

I decided that as the foliage was dying down on all of them they might as well come up out of the ground and do their drying in the shed which is draughty enough to allow drying to occur. The Husband kindly attached battens to the walls of the shed so that various hooks could be screwed in to hang implements from, and these battens actually make handy little shelves which, although extremely narrow, are wide enough to support an onion bulb. I've also got some hanging up in a pair of tights in my garage with a plastic tie between each one so they don't touch - the idea being that you cut the toe off the tights leg and remove the onion, undoing the tie so the next one drops down. It seems to work except that I can't seem to hang the tights high enough so they don't drag on the floor! We've eaten a few as well and while they're not as eye-wateringly strong as I remember previously home-grown onions to be, they're most acceptable. They're also very crunchy, which I like. So as long as they dry properly and store well, I'm going to chalk that up as a huge success for the onion crop! Next thing I have to do is track down some over-wintering Japanese onion sets to plant in September and see if they work.

The lettuce hedge is no more. The Salad Bowl lettuce was brilliant but bolted, as had the Wild Rocket, so they all had to come out. I've been successionally growing Lollo Rossa lettuce as well though so we're now eating them. I've also sown some mixed lettuce seeds that, supposedly, I can overwinter if I put cloches over them, so we can have salad leaves in Spring. I'm pretty cynical about that working but I'll give it a go. My carrots, however, are going from strength to strength. Luckily (touch wood) I think I've managed to avoid Carrot Root Fly as I've found no evidence yet in any of the carrots I've dug up, so I've just carried on sowing seeds at 2-3 week intervals, and planting them out in the plopment when big enough to handle. Although it may not be terribly clear from the picture but there are 5 rows of carrots, each with about 20 plants, so that's (hopefully) 100 carrots! The orange string shows where the latest row of little transplants went in a few days ago.

I think my Sweetcorn will be ready to eat very soon but I'm going to leave them a bit longer yet.

I've been gradually earthing up my Leeks individually lately. You do this so that a large percentage of the plant is blanched - the white bit that is eaten. I'm rather pleased with how they've come along especially as Leek Growing Lore seems to be very complicated and I just ignored all that and shoved them in the ground. We'll see what happens when I come to harvest them next year though. Hopefully I should get about 35 Leeks come harvest time, all of varying sizes I should imagine. The local Fruit & Vegetable Show is on in a couple of days and while part of me is quite tempted to have a go at entering some of my produce, I don't honestly think I've got anything that's of Show standard. I've been concentrating far too much on getting the ground cleared and actually producing something edible than to bother with all the palaver of producing showbench winning veg! Maybe next year though...

The Cucumbers have been a runaway success but are now, I think, coming to the end. I took a couple of pictures about 10 days ago so am posting them now. The first picture shows what they look like on the plant - this view reminds me of H R Giger's designs for the original 'Alien' film - all dark, smooth and tubular. I then picked them and laid them out on my kneeling pad with my trowel for size perspective - aren't they great!! Since then two have been sliced up and are sitting in two Kilner jars in pickling vinegar to be eaten over the winter, and we're eating our way through the others. Even after 10 days in the fridge they remain solid, hard, crunchy and juicy. I genuinely didn't expect to get anything like as good as this. Guess I'll be growing them again next year!

The Broad Beans have now all finished and I'll be taking out the plants quite soon, but leaving the roots in the ground as the roots of all bean plants fix nitrogen in the soil, so it's best to leave them. All of my Pentland Javelin first early potatoes are now out of the ground and either in storage or have been eaten. In their place I've sown Winter Spinach and Swiss Chard. The picture shows the Winter Spinach which has grown a bit quicker than I expected really (the black plastic covers the ground where the onions had been). I tasted one of the leaves the other day and it seems to be quite nice. I understand, though, that instead of just taking off individual leaves like you would with ordinary spinach, for winter spinach you cut off the entire plant to use, leaving the roots in the ground from which the plant regrows!

What else? The Herb Garden beside the shed has been quite prolific, even if I didn't eat very much of it. We had some of the French Sorrel as salad leaves (it tastes just like uncooked Bramley cooking apple), and I made some soup with the ordinary Sorrel (which was nice enough but not outstanding). The Basil I'm going to have a go at drying in my airing cupboard to then crumble up to put in a jar. The Garlic Chives I didn't use at all but as it's a perennial, it'll be there next year.
The Coriander has loved its location but is flowering like billyo now - I may save the seeds. The sweet peppers are coming along nicely as well - I have half a dozen decent sized green peppers but I don't like them green so even though I could pick and eat them now, I'm going to wait until they turn red.

The tomato plants are rampant but I have a horrible feeling there may be some blight there - there were fruits with tell-tale brown marking on the top. The brassicas are doing well, especially as I spend about an hour each visit just picking off the dang caterpillers. The green leafy growth coming out of the parsnips is just vast - I'm a bit concerned they're going to be huge and woody by the time I come to eat them, and I wanted to have them over winter rather than in the autumn. Is a puzzlement.

My First Cucumber!!!

Ladeez and Gennelmen - it gives me great pleasure, and no small amount of pride, to be able to introduce to you, my very first ever homegrown cucumber [drumroll]

Ta-Dah!! I decided that today was the day that the cucumber was big enough to be harvested and to commemorate the occasion, I've taken a couple of photographs so I can remember what it looked like after I've eaten it. So, for example, here it is reclining gently on the handrail of the bridge that leads to my garden.

Then I decided it did need something to compare it with so that you, gentle reader, might have some idea of the humungous size it had achieved, so here it is, sitting next to Sylvester, our slightly-
larger-than-
average cat who just happened to be there at the time I had the camera in my hand so was roped in to act as a ruler.

I also noticed at the plopment today that the tassels have started appearing on my developing sweetcorn cobs, so that means I have to start watering them all from now until harvesting. And one or two of the Broad Bean plants have started putting out shoots from the base - I dunno what that's all about but I'm inclined to leave them to see what happens, and if I get extra additional unexpected bonus beans, then so much the better!

I put in a few more Winter Spinach plants, so there's seven gone in now where some Pentland Javelin spuds have come out, and I think I'm going to investigate sowing Spring Cabbage for overwintering, to be eaten next May or thereabouts. Oh, and I must just tell you, we ate those gnarly carrots last night and the taste was almost overpowering!! It was like eating solid Essence of Carrot - intense wasn't the word. I've never eaten homegrown carrots fresh out of the ground before and it was just astonishing, frankly. So I'm definitely sowing more of those babies, you betcha!

Finally, by way of a change, I caught my 2.5 cats sitting companionably on the bridge this afternoon and, as it so rarely happens, I took a picture and am posting it here for your delectation. The black cat is Damian, my 0.5 boy - he spends half his time with us and the rest at his other house, 3 doors down. Then in the middle being sociable and facing the camera is Sylvester, and finally, closest to us but facing away is Pepper. They all say 'hello', by the way.

It's NOT a monsoon, okay?

According to the BBC, yesterday's downpour was absolutely not a monsoon although, apparently, some of the more populist newspapers were calling it such. According to The People Who Know About These Sort Of Things (i.e., proper scientists), 'monsoons' only occur in the Indian Subcontinent and although, as in this case, the term is frequently misused to describe heavy rain, it actually refers to the seasonal reversal of wind direction. So all we had was a month's worth of rain in one 24 hour period. And, boy, didn't it feel like it?!

I decided that I really ought to check out the plopment and see if everything was still there. I haven't been posting much because, frankly, I don't think it's all that interesting for you guys to read that I cut some lettuce for my tea, did some weeding and decided to stake my tomatoes as they were getting a bit tall and being blown over by the wind at our exposed site. But an update is a bit overdue.

I went down to the site for a couple of hours today just after lunch and, thankfully, everything was still there and thriving happily, so let me put up some piccies:

First off, here are the tomatoes which, as you can see, have now been staked! These eleven plants were given to me by a friend who didn't know what they were (other than tomatoes), i.e., whether they were bush or ... er ... the other kind (what are they called? you know, the ones that grow tall?) Anyway, I stuck them in the ground, did that business of removing the side shoots (when I remembered) and they seem to be happy enough. There are flowers and everything now. When the fruits start forming, I'll have to remember to start feeding them. After taking this picture I weeded out the encroaching couch grass that you can see at the bottom of the picture - b***** stuff....

Growing just behind the tomatoes are my outdoor indoor cucumbers. These are Telegraph cucumber plants which are, ideally, meant to be grown indoors but I'm trying them outdoors and I'm surprised at how well they're doing. They've thoroughly enjoyed the recent wet weather and there are a handful of little baby cucumbers coming along on both plants. I had to tie them further up the bamboo poles so that they don't trail on the ground and the plants and stems are really hairy and feel like they should sting but don't - bizarre. You can also see one of the cucumbers coming along nicely.

The onions are doing very well although apparently there's been an outbreak of Downy Mildew on some plots further up the site. I had a look at mine today and I'm not sure if they've contracted this or not. I'll need to keep a close eye on them because I'm very proud of my onions this year. The close up picture shows how large they've grown in comparison to an ordinary trowel. I think I'm going to have to start harvesting some soon...


So, what next? I'm growing Climbing French Beans (var: Cobra) up poles this year (I prefer french beans to runners which get stringy) and even though most of the plants are nowhere near the top of the poles yet, I've started harvesting some damn fine looking beans. Last year, before I had the plopment, and for several years before I had been growing French Beans in a couple of huge pots at home and last year had barely a pound of beans from them in total all summer. I think I've picked around a pound of beans just today so this all bodes well! Yum!

Just at the bottom right of the bean plant picture, you can see the Red Cabbages, so here's a better picture of the six biggest ones. I have some others growing in the brassica patch but they're much smaller so should mature a bit later in the year.

Also in the brassica patch are my gorgeous Curly Kale. I have been cooking a fabulous pasta recipe using garlic, bacon and Curly Kale so decided to grow it rather than buy the pre-shredded bagged stuff from the supermarket. My veg book (the Hessayon one) said that Kale was one of the easiest vegetables to grow and I can say it's been simple - just put the seed in a pot and it grows! I think we're going to be able to start harvesting a few leaves very soon, so I may well have to sow a few more seeds to get plants to see us through winter. You can't really tell from the picture (because it's been taken looking down on the plants and through the netting) but they're actually about a foot tall).

The sweetcorn is doing its sweetcorny thing, with each plant getting bigger and taller at different rates! When the wind is blowing through them they have that lovely rustly tall grass sound. Fingers crossed that I get some decent cobs out of them.

Finally, despite the wind and the cold, my little red pepper plants are still hanging on in there and starting to put out flowers which, hopefully, will turn into luscious sweet red peppers. Actually, I've already decided that if they don't work this year I shall persevere with them next year, perhaps finding different ways to grow them because (a) I like them and (b) they're so blimmin' expensive in the shops - I mean, 69p each!! - that's it's worth keeping going until I get it right!

Dog Days of Summer have arrived!

I thought today was the last day of June until my husband sent me a text saying, "Pinch, punch, First of the month, no returns!!" ('cos we're grownups now, innit) but I have to concede (...mutter, grumble...) that, in this case at least, he's absolutely right - 1 July it is. June seems to have flown by and, indeed, I seem to have been a bit tardy with my blogging but that doesn't mean I've not been down the plopment slogging my guts out darn near every single day (honest!). I mean, the weather's been so good lately that you can't ignore it - the weeds don't stop growing just because you fancy having a day off.

As a complete aside, I found out today why the hottest months of the summer are called (by some folk, but not me, I just call them July, August and September) 'Dog Days'. Apparently they're named after the dog star, Sirius. Starting about 3 July Sirius rises and sets in conjunction with the Sun. In Ancient Egypt, Sirius was the Nile Star and its rising signalled the flooding of the Nile. The name Sirius has two possible origins. It may come from the Egyptian word for Nile, or from the Greek seirios, meaning 'scorching'. The Romans called it 'Canicula'. Believing the star drove men and dogs mad, a brown dog was sacrificed to pacify it at the time of the blazing hot days of summer (when the star rose) which were called 'Caniculares' - it is this Latin word that was translated in the 16th century to 'Dog Days'. So there you are, bet you didn't know that!

Anyhoo, to return to what's going on at the plopment - you may recall that I planted four sweet red pepper plants against the shed. I've now decided to turn that into a small herb garden as well, bordered on the two short sides by lavender to form a sort of windbreak (when they get bigger of course). So last weekend The Husband and I ventured into Guildford to find that the Guildford Festival was running. When I lived in Guildford I always used to love dawdling amongst the craft stalls that go up and down the cobbled High Street during the Festival so I insisted that I had to have a decent perusal. The Husband, being a bloke of course, ran off to a bookshop. I eventually found myself at the herb stall. They've been coming for years and grow literally hundreds of varieties of herbs in the Surrey Hills and it's always tricky deciding what to get. In the end I got French Sorrel (which tastes like uncooked Bramley Apple), Broad Leaved Sorrel (which has a sharp, slightly lemony tang), Coriander, Sweet Basil and Garlic Chives. I got just one of each and planted them in front of the red peppers. Let's see how they go.

Apart from that, I've been mainly clearing more ground, weeding and watering. So here are a few pictures for you to see what's going on. Firstly, this is the lettuce patch - aren't the colours retina-searing? I love that bright lime green of the Salad Bowl. I've been smart (for once) and done proper successional planting so that there should be enough to last the summer. I'm also growing a handful of Wild Rocket (the dark green plants in the picture) a few red crinkly Lollo Rossa lettuces as well (just out of frame on the left). This is where Cynthia (R.I.P.) used to live. No sign of her I'm afraid, I think she's gone to the great Toybox in the sky.






What else? The sweetcorn are marvellous - I've barely watered them and they've just taken care of themselves. I hope we get a decent batch of cobs from them.






And I'm extremely pleased with how well the Telegraph Cucumbers are doing outdoors - see, here's a little cucumber! (Sorry it's a bit out of focus but you can see how enormous it is!)











This is just a general shot of the plopment, facing up the hill rather than towards my shed for a change. You can see that I have, once again, extended the brassica cage and I've still got Swede busily germinating in the plastic-house at home that will need to go in there, so it'll get bigger yet!




And - finally - one of The Husband, taking a well-earned rest after doing an hour's weeding of the potatoes for me - bless!

June is bustin' out all over......

Things are looking good at the plopment! I'm managing to get down there most days, especially during this current spell of very hot weather, and "I'll be gone just an hour" turns into "Whoops - where did the last three hours go to?"

I recently invested in a stainless steel hoe and I have to say it's worth its weight in gold; because the ground's so dusty-dry at the moment, it really doesn't take long at all just to push it through the top inch or so of ground to cut through the stems and roots of the opportunistic weeds! You then leave it all on the top to dry to a crisp in the sun - brilliant! Of course, the Mare's Tail is more than a little recalcitrant and I'm fully aware you can never really get rid of it properly so I just pull up what I can when I find it. Now if there were only recipes for Mare's Tail.....

As I've mentioned previously, I make and sell jewellery at craft fairs and the most recent one I exhibited at was last Sunday (8 June 2008) at Chiddingfold in Surrey. We had a fabulous day - it was unbelievably hot and attendance was really high. It's a typical English fete with lots of stalls, tug-of-war, maypole and country dancing, beer tents (hooray!), etc., and I managed to pick up two gorgeous-looking and extremely healthy Cucumber plants that I thought I'd have a go at growing outside. They are both Telegraph which I believe is traditionally grown in a greenhouse but with global warming is apparently starting to be grown outdoors as well these days. So I thought I'd give them a go. I built them a little wigwam and planted both of them at the base (shame there wasn't a third available but guess you can't have everything!). I believe I'm meant to leave the main growing stem to produce 6 or 7 leaves and then pinch it out. It then produces side shoots/stems which need to be tied to the poles. The fruit will then hang down and grow straight. Alternatively, you can leave it to sprawl on the ground but then I understand the fruit tends not to grown straight (not sure what shape it does grow into though - corkscrew? square?) This is all new territory for me so I'll keep you posted. I also planted my first 10 decent sized Parsnip plantlets (bigger than seedlings but not quite plants) just beside the Cucumbers, as you can see from the picture - they're the plants at the bottom of the picture, the ones on the left are my Sweetcorn. The black plastic at the top is covering the weeded ground that's going to be home to the Leeks when they get big enough to transplant.

I've also extended the brassica net cage yet again, sideways this time, in order to slot in the last of my Red Cabbage plants. And, yes, I can't either dig or plant in a straight line, it really is all as curved as it looks but as long as stuff gets put in the ground and grows successfully, who really cares? I've left enough space now for the Savoy Cabbage which should be going in fairly soon.











This picture shows a better view of the first six Red Cabbage and six Sprout plants that went in. I'm so pleased (and desperately smug!) that they're looking so healthy AND I grew them from seed - yay me!!

Yes, I know this is a picture of lettuce under a small polytunnel but I'd already put the tunnel back over them before I decided I wanted to take a picture and it's so fiddly to do that I decided you'll be able to see the size of the lettuce anyway! I'm very pleased with them, they're all totally untouched by both slug and pigeon so hopefully we'll be able to start harvesting some leaves from them soon.






Finally, because they've not made an appearance on the blog for a long time - check out my onions! This is a variety called 'Turbo' grown from sets and look pretty fantastic, although the round bit at the base that you eat has yet to get round. I cleared some soil from around the neck of one of the onions and it just looks like a massive spring onion, so I'm hoping they'll fill out before long.