We made the most of the good weather last week, and spent four afternoons on the allotment, so we managed to get a lot of planting done and seeds that were sown directly are now making an effort.
Parsnip germination has, in the end, turned out quite well. As I sowed two seeds to every station, I will soon need to carry out the heart-breaking task of removing one seedling where both seeds have germinated. It's such a shame that we can't transplant the thinned seedlings elsewhere.
The carrots are also starting to grow away.
The peas that were resown, after the first sowing failed to show, have grown really well which means, at least, the seeds were fine. We covered the second sowing with enviromesh so did that protect the seeds or did the drier conditions mean that the seeds didn't rot? Who knows? At least now we have peas that will soon need to be given twiggy supports.
The runner and climbing French bean supports were already in place so we just needed to plant the beans which is done.
One planting that didn't go so well was the sweet corn. Every time we plant out our sweet corn there seems to be a fairly strong wind blowing, and last week was no exception. To try to thwart the wind, I popped up a temporary barrier of enviromesh. Unfortunately this didn't prevent the wind from flattening the young plants. Time will tell whether or not any plants recover.
Whilst I did some planting and general tidying, Martyn set to with the rotovator and prepared all the remaining beds so that they were ready to plant up.
In some of the beds were planted the curcurbits. We planted three varieties of squash - Crown Prince, Autumn Crown and Pink Banana and three varieties of courgette - Ambassador, Boldenice, a round fruiting variety, and Black Forest, a climbing courgette. We've never grown a climbing courgette before so it should be interesting.
I crawled into the makeshift, open topped tent to plant the left over tomato plants. We don't expect too much from them, but hate to throw plants away, so they are given a chance to grow. As well as working in a rather cramped position, I also had to keep a wary eye out for my nemeses - the ants!
This year our annual flower seeds were sown in the greenhouse, so some of these were planted alongside our new dahlia plants, and some extra dahlias given to us by a fellow plotter.
A bed has been prepared, and covered with an enviromesh tunnel in readiness to plant more brassicas - hopefully next week.
Alongside the tunnel, another climbing bean frame has been erected, ready for our left over bean plants.
Where flowering plants self seed, unless they choose an inconvenient position, they are left to just get on with life. Foxgloves growing, in the fruit beds, and sweet rocket growing in various random positions, are now flowering and putting on a display. The sweet rocket is providing some attractive perfume too.
As we have been doing for some weeks now, we harvested a few sticks of rhubarb. The variety was Raspberry Red which when stewed is a deep pink colour.
As well as harvesting rhubarb we had a couple of firsts. We picked a couple of small helpings of strawberries from our fading strawberry bed.
I also cut our first bunch of cut flowers. The sweet Williams are from our plot and the sweet peas were cut from a neighbour's plot. He did tell me to pick some as he had too many for himself. Our sweet peas won't be flowering for a few weeks. The scent is perfuming the house as I type.
One meal that used some of our frozen French beans was a vegetable rice dish based on this recipe. In another I used some of our frozen squash to make a Thai style curry based on this recipe. All in all it was a very busy week, after all you never know when all that wet weather is going to descend on us again. Now at least we don't have lots of empty beds to look at and the plot looks lived in!
I nearly forgot - I said that I would put the link to the video showing how we planted our leeks the week before last. If you are interested it is posted here. The leeks, by the way, are now starting to perk up nicely.
As well as working on the allotment we managed to get out and about. I posted about this in my last post.
As always wherever you are keep safe and well.
This week, once again, I'm going to join in with Dave’s Harvest Monday collection of posts over at Our Happy Acres. 