Winter makes a comeback

I continued to plant up our new strawberry bed last week as some of the plants just wouldn't hang on in the cold frame any longer.

There are still a few plants waiting in the cold frame but, after the forecast of frosty nights to come, we decided to leave the remaining plants in the relative protection.

We spent an afternoon last week preparing for the onslaught of winter - not quite as desperately as shown in the episode of a current TV programme but with just as much urgency..

Unaware of the frosty welcome, quite a few of our open ground planted potatoes had pushed through the soil. If the frost touched the young leaves they would shrivel and, although experience tells us that the plants would recover, we wanted to try to avoid the setback in growth that this would cause.

The bed of the earliest planted potatoes were not planted though weed control fabric and so we hoped that earthing up the soil over the new leaves would offer them sufficient protection.

We had some straw that had been used to protect the carrot bed over winter, so we covered the next most advanced potatoes with most of that.  The remaining potatoes were less advanced with only the odd shoots pushing through the soil so we used the remaining straw more sparingly and when the straw ran out we used some dry material from the compost bins.

We also wanted to try and avoid the flowers on the newly planted strawberry bed from being frosted so we decided to cover the bed with a double layer of enviromesh. Enviromesh isn't expected to offer much protection against frost but we are hoping that it helped. It certainly was better than nothing.

Another candidate for protection was the newly planted out kiwi berry - Issia. You may remember that soon after planting frost burned and shriveled all it's leaves. New leaf buds had just started to develop and so we decided to cover that too with a double layer of enviromesh.

Everything else was left to fend for itself. I'm sure that the newly emerging peas will have survived.

We did have cold weather at the end of last week but the temperatures didn't fall quite as low as predicted so hopefully not too much damage will  have been done.

We hope to get to the allotment this afternoon so we will see!

Our harvest last week was miniscule.

30 April

The cauliflower and small cabbage above made up our total usable harvest. We did cut another cabbage later in the week.

2 May

Unfortunately as I peeled back each layer of leaves it became apparent that all this was good for was the compost heap.

I guess this week's harvest will be limited to rhubarb so it's a good job that we have peas, green beans and red cabbage in the freezer to tide us over.

 Our complete monthly harvests are listed here.

This week I am embarrassingly linking to harvest Monday hosted on 

Dave's blog Our Happy Acres

By the way, thanks to those who responded to my invitation to make a comment. I appreciate you taking the trouble to say hello. I know I get lots of visitors who never comment and I'd love to know who you are - unlike the annoying spammers who can't seem to grasp that their comments go straight into my spam folder and never see the light of day.

You don't have to have your own blog in order to join in conversations. It may seem that everyone who comments knows one another but bloggers always welcome new commenters, after all that is how we all started.

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett