We took advantage of the long weekend to get absolutely loads done off our ever changing to-do list. We managed to get to the allotment on each of the last three days (although once was just to feed the chickens and let them out).
One thing we seem to have no trouble growing are these mushrooms. They take advantage of the wet and warm weather we’ve been having and sneak up around your plot when you are not looking. They take about 4 seconds to grow. Ok, maybe not quite that quick but you get the idea. We had about 8 of the blighters to add to the compost heap. We’d planted some broad beans and sweet peas out last week, which were our first transplanted seeds, so the first job was to check they are ok and they seem to be thriving. We’ve been having nightmares all week about hoards of roaming slugs coming to devour them!
Next up I set about planting more sweet peas across the front of the plot and up the fence and Pilla planted a few of the seeds we were a bit late starting off in the greenhouse, sweetcorn and courgettes. Pilla then started the epic task of transplanting seeds in the greenhouse. Pretty much everything we have planted is doing well so we had a lot of things to move into bigger pots, which included: lots of different tomato varieties, peppers, cauliflowers, sunflowers, cucumbers, basil, parsley and sweet majoram. It’s a fairly time consuming process and you have to make some life and death decisions over which seedlings to keep and which go to the great compost heap in the sky. It was carnage.
After adding a third water butt next to the greenhouse with some bricks from Sharon’s plot we called it a day (hi Sharon!). Today we caught up with planting the things we should have put out in late April. The big thing to get planted were the carrots. We’ve sort of run out of bed space for them so we have planted them in a selection of sqaure Pearson bins – which all had to be cleaned out, drilled, lined with membrane, and then layered up with gravel, soil and stone free soil. We now have three varieties sown – regular, round and purple. Whilst I was doing this Pilla was on a mad planting spree – filling up beds with a couple of types of beetroot and spring onions.
We have lots of things growing outside now – our parsnips have germinated and are doing so well we had to thin them down. We have had to do the same with the radishes and leaf beet. Our red and white onions have started sprouting and some potatoes are starting to appear above the soil. Other less desirable things are growing too – the plot has sprouted quite a lot of weeds. The raised beds help quite a lot with weeding because you can sit on the edge of one and reach across quite easily.
We have about a million spiders in our greenhouse and they were temporarily joined today by a butterfly, who was reading the seed packet and complaining about vague spacing instructions I think!
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