Steph was at the plot yesterday, just for a bit of a wander, and one of the other plotholders said he thought our red onions look like they’ve been attacked.

I went up today to inspect the damage. Decided to leave the red onions in for now and see what happens with them. Did remove the winter onions, which I’ve been thinking about doing, and some are starting to flower. Some of them have obviously got a bit upset about having wet feet from the recent rains, and some are damaged by the onion fly larvae. Hopefully the rest will be OK and store for a while without too much further damage.

Cleared several barrow loads of weeds from the winter onion section. One now has peas planted – assuming the pigeons don’t get the shoots – a liberal application of bits of polytunnel and 1/2 drinks bottles to distract them has been added! Planted out the celery into one of the gaps from the onions – it was all looking a bit pot bound, which apparently celery doesn’t like.

Also planted out the remaining 8 climbing French bean plants as well as a couple of onion squash/pumpkin/courgette plants to fill the gaps – don’t really need any more plants, but they might as well get used!

Not very happy with my beans in general – everyone else’s runners are going up the poles. Mine just sit at the bottom. I’ve tied them to the poles at the bottoms – the few that had grabbed on themselves have grown better, so maybe they just need a little direction!

A couple of plot-holders also mentioned the grass in the middle of the plot, and that maybe I should give it a spray. I wasn’t sure if it was a hint that I should do something about it, so I took up their offer to borrow some weed-killer spray to tackle the grass. I’m probably not going to be able to get up to clear it in the next couple of weeks anyway, so the weedkiller should have done its job by then and it’ll all be easy to remove

In the middle bit we didn’t really have plans for this year anyway, though we’re thinking of planting some grapevines either late this year, or into next year. If they are allowed that is.

All in all though, I think a reasonably productive afternoon at the plot!

The site treasurer was talking about buying a roll of enviromesh, which is quite expensive in shops, but across the site a big roll should hopefully work out not too expensive. I think it might be worth getting some to protect the onions, and maybe carrots next year!

Fruit on Cucumber plants

Potted on the cucumber plants, Tiffany and Zeina, both starting to get fruit on them but were in need of moving to larger pots. Tied in the Plum and Beef tomatoes which are taller than the Moneymakers at present – though I did buy these plants rather than growing from seed. Fruit starting to appear on the Plum tomato, so I thought a good feed was in order.

Also transplanted the melon plants. We have 4 Eldorado and 4 Edonis. The growbags claimed 4 plants per bag! Last year though 2 was a lot for each one, so 2 pairs have gone in growbags, the rest into very large plant pots. Need to take care with pinching out the tops this year to get proper laterals to form!

Finally got around to hacking out the buddleia which is right next to the house. It had just overgrown the space really and was encroaching massively on the path. Never really seen any huge number of butterflies or bees on it either. The digging up was spurred on by managed to get hold of some dwarf buddleia varieties – a deep mauve/purple and a marbled white one. We’ve been looking around for a while and were going to get a couple from T&M, but we were passing Barnett Hill garden centre and they happened to have them in, on special offer as well!

Cut out one of the broom’s main stems as well as that was getting a bit on the large side. I read they are difficult to prune, so I thought taking out the main stem was easier. Re-staked it as well to pull it back upright.

Also planted up some hanging baskets at last. I never really get on well with baskets, I think I leave them too late and then don’t water enough. Basically just trailling lobellia and some left over petunias as well. We’ll see….

Bit worried about the sweetcorn, its been a dry week and it gets shocked if it doesn’t get watered properly and then stops growing. Hopefully at least some of it will survive!

The beans are looking OK, and the climbing French ones are already better than I managed at all last year! Radishes I sowed in the gaps are also starting to sprout already!

Really need to find some space to plant out the last beans I still have at home!

Planted our sunflowers, corn flowers and sweet peas into flower bit.

Picked my first crop of the year! Admittedly its only radishes (French Breakfast), but still a crop!

Remainder of the corn is now out as well as the leeks… not sure how well they will do, but they are covered by scaffold net to try to keep onion fly at bay.

Back at home, the hedge had its first trim of the season, gave it quite a hard cutting at the top to try and push it back a bit.

Planted on rubens peppers in the green house.

It looked low on oil so I topped it up with some shiny new oil. Ran for about 2 mins with a big cloud of smoke before dying again. I guess more oil in the engine. Probably getting it up and down the garden steps has got oil well and truely round the engine.

I think a new on is in order! Electric this time!

Planted runner and 4 climbing French beans, as well as a row of dwarf French beans. Added a row or two of radishes between poles for fun…

Earthed up the spuds, feeding with pelleted chicken manure and potato feed. Well, more sort of raked the peaks between the rows over the plants.

Not just the bassicas though. The cage has landed on some of the sweetcorn, squashing and bending it!

Second attempt at growing climbing french beans, moved the runners to the cold frame to harden them off.

Planted up a second tomato growbag with Moneymakers, grown from seed. Some of the plants are getting but, others are still tiny! – Selected the bigger ones to plant on. Will save the rest just in case though!

Planted more sweetcorn and a second round of comfrey seeds – need lots for the allotment as a compost accelerator and liquid feed (though apparently it stinks!).

Planted some brocolli claret seeds.

Rows of lettuces

Took peas & lettuces to plot for sowing … had a tray crises with the lettuces – kicked one over and they fell everywhere. Not convinced they will grow, but worth a shot! And they were looking very unhappy in the greenhouse!

Planted boltardy beetroot seeds at the plot next to the fennel.

Removed the remainder of last years leeks and started to clear the rock solid ground htere.

At home, numerous seedlings have been potted on. The peas have started to sprout, despite the cats jumping on them over the fence!

Purple Senetti Flowers

I did move them back into the greenhouse, but whilst chilly in the morning, I don’t think there was actually a frost.

And then yesterday evening, I found a number of my climbing French bean have germinated … so after complaining they hadn’t done anything, suddenly they have appeared.

Incidentally I noticed the celery has finally started to sprout at the weekend, very fine wispy seedlings at the moment, they went in on 29th March, so its taken nearly a month for germination. Perhaps they would have preferred being inside on a windowsill, but we don’t have enough windowsills for everything that would prefer to be there!

So, what’s been going on today?

Planted out the Senetti we bought recently into pots, the label claims they can be planted out from mid-March if cold grown, though I have no idea if that is how they have been grown! The nursery we got them from said don’t plant out until May, though they are in pots, so I’ll need to keep a look out for any late frosts which might attack them. The Senetti have large brightly coloured flowers and are supposed to re-flower after 4 weeks if you cut them back. We’ve bought them before a few years ago – in fact we saw them on Gardener’s World some time ago, with Monty Don planting them out.

A few cornflower plants got planted into the garden, they are still quite small so I’m not sure they’ll survive, but they were growing out the bottom of the tray in the greenhouse!

Moved the first sowing of sweet peas, Redbor Kale and one set of leeks out to the cold-frame to start acclimatising them.

So far three of the red onion squash have germinated and six comfrey seeds, all still too small to transplant though, but the squash seem to grow quite quickly so I’ll need to keep an eye on it over the next week.

Potted on the zucchino (ball courgettes), all eight seeds germianted, so sowing two per pot wasn’t needed!

Transplanted some of the Moneymaker tomato plants, though the rest aren’t really big enough to move yet. The rest of the chili/peppers sown at the same time aren’t yet ready for transplanting.

Still no sign of the cobra climbing french bean. I suspect the seeds might be a bit old now. Mars pumpkin and Hungarian wax chili haven’t shown any sign  of movement yet nor the catmint … the cats will have to cope with the small plant they didn’t get the chance to eat last year!

Also soweds white lady runner bean, green sweet basil, edonis melon, prince dwark bean and eldorado melon – this is the second attempt at this variety after the first sowing germinated and then went yellow and died!

3 cucumber plants potted on + plum and beefsteak tomato plants bought last week. The celery is at last starting to sprout!

All the potting on was into ‘kayak’ growbag compost. Whilst tidying the herb pots in the garden, some of this compost got added to a pot, which caused a swarm of yellow flies to appear … beware if you use it outside! I added a layer of coir compost (from compressed bricks) onto the surface of the pots to mask the smell of the compost which seemed to do the trick.

And at the allotment…

Well, that was all at home in the greenhouse, up at the plot I chicken manured the corn plot and dug it over, also made a seed bed for salad crops. That was a lot of work as the soil where I wanted it to go is very clayey and lumpy. The larger lumps have been removed and dumped in the compost bin – hopefully the worms might have a got at breaking them up for me.

Into the seedbed has gone:

• lettuce lollo rossa
• radish sparkler 3
• radish French breakfast 3
• rocket
• chervil
• fennel (Florence)

Also cleared a bit at the bottom of the plot where the soil is much looser and planted some White Gem parsnip seeds.

All in all, I think a good days work!

We’ve been trying to find the New Horizon ones featured on the Gardener’s World special some weeks ago and also got a Which Best Buy, but nowhere round here seems to sell them. The only place we hadn’t tried was Barnett Hill.

They didn’t have them either, but I did find an alternative which was interesting – the Vital Earth Kayak grow bag. They were £2.99 each, and only had a few left. We’ll have to see how they perform… See link for picture.

Oh and as for the steps, I finally got round to finishing the deck by building the steps … people kept complaining about the gap as some sort of animal trap! That took a lot longer than I anticipated, mostly trying to get things level as neither the old steps or path were, oh and the old steps took a lot more removing than you might think from looking at them!

And on books

And finally, a quick note on books, whilst milling round a shopping centre, I popped into WHSmith and poked around the gardening section.  I was amazed how many allotment books they now have on the shelves. I’m sure last year there weren’t half as many – just goes to show how popular growing your own is getting!

I did see an interesting RHS pair of books, the first on Vegetable growing, the second on Organic Gardening. The first has a wealth of information on growing all sorts of different things, and not just the regular stuff either. The second had a whole section of tips on dealing with pests and diseases in an organic way. I think I might invest.

We have the RHS guide to cuttings and propagation, which is excellent. They don’t have glossy photos, just clear guidance and illustrations, which I think is part of their charm!

• Twinkle ( ~12 weeks)
• Javelin (~14 weeks)
• Oregon (mangetout)
• Cascadia (sugar snap)