There aren’t many times in the year when I don’t have some young plants about the place, just poking their noses above the soil. At the moment it’s mainly salads and a few annual herbs – I sowed some coriander last week and I’m gearing up for some more parsley soon to see me through [...]
Archive for the ‘sowing’ Category
Late arrivals
Posted in Allotments, sowing, tagged sowing, beans on July 31, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Peas please!
Posted in Allotments, sowing, tagged sowing, peas, gluts, successional sowing on April 18, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I’m late! Again. Every year at about this time the sheer number of tasks that need to be done gradually, relentlessly, overtake the amount of time available in which to do them. So I get a bit behind… and then a bit more behind… until eventually I am, undeniably, late. So it has been with [...]
Progress reports
Posted in Allotments, Greenhouse growing, Other stuff, Soil care, sowing, tagged beans, blackcurrants, carrots, cooking, forcing, green manure, potatoes, seed, slugs, sowing, strawberries, time management, weather on April 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Spring has sprung, the grass is high, and I’m just pausing for breath before the next manic session of seed-sowing (tender veg this month). So while I’ve got a cup of tea to hand and my feet up on the potting bench I thought I’d take stock a little and see how all those many, [...]
Full of Easter promise
Posted in Allotments, sowing, tagged onions, sowing, watering on April 4, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Happy Easter! May all your days from here on in be springlike and sunny and bursting with new growth, jolly daffodils and the like. There’s been precious little of that lately (apart from the daffodils, of course, which line one end of my allotment rather cheerfully after I had a little experiment in growing cut [...]
Taking the direct approach
Posted in Allotments, sowing, tagged baby leaf salads, beans, beetroot, carrots, peas, pests, seed, slugs, sowing, spring onions, time management, watering, weather on March 17, 2010 | 3 Comments »
I don’t know why all the gardening books tell you sowing seed direct into the ground is the obvious and therefore, presumably, easiest option. When I first started veg growing, I followed the general assumption that there’s no other way to do it. This meant I lost my entire first year’s seedlings to marauding slugs: at the time I [...]
That’s shallot
Posted in Allotments, sowing, tagged onions, shallots, sowing on March 10, 2010 | 5 Comments »
If you don’t count the broad beans and garlic, both of which I put in before the winter proper began, shallots are always the first off the starting blocks in spring on my plot. Normally I have them in by mid-February, but this year I’ve held back a couple of weeks because I didn’t fancy planting them with an icepick. [...]
Limping out the other side
Posted in Allotments, sowing, tagged beans, broad beans, cloches, frost, seed, sowing, successional sowing, weather, winter on March 4, 2010 | 3 Comments »
In celebratory mood this week as the sun is out at last! The ice-covered puddles have melted and are drying up, the soil is becoming workable, and I can smell spring in the air. First for the post-winter casualty-assessment inspection were my four rows of broad beans, which have been sheltering under their polythene cloches all [...]
Tales of an impatient gardener
Posted in Greenhouse growing, Propagation, sowing, tagged baby leaf salads, carrots, parsnips, salads, seed, sowing, spring, time management, tomatoes, winter on February 28, 2010 | 2 Comments »
It’s no good: I can’t resist. This happens every year in February. There’s something about the turn of the month that makes your gardening brain go into “spring” mode. Whatever the weather outside – and let’s face it, we’ve had some pretty horrific weather this year – I just want to get growing. If I were [...]
Of sun and wind
Posted in Unusual veg, sowing, tagged edible passion fruit, Jerusalem artichokes, slugs on February 12, 2010 | 3 Comments »
This is the other coveted prize I carried home from the wonderful Potato Day I went to in Hampshire the other week. It may not look very promising: it’s just a knobbly sort of lumpy thing a couple of inches across. But within that unglamorous exterior is the promise of wonderful things to come. It is, of course, a Jerusalem [...]
The eyes have it
Posted in Allotments, Greenhouse growing, Storing, sowing, tagged chitting, potatoes, sowing on February 7, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Get a room full of keen veg-growers together at this time of year, and sooner or later you can guarantee the talk will turn to whether or not you chit your potatoes. It’s one of those pieces of wisdom that’s handed down unquestioned from gardener to gardener through the ages: when your seed potatoes arrive, you stand them [...]
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Harvesting Now
Blackcurrants, calabrese, cauliflower, courgettes, French beans, garlic, globe artichokes, gooseberries, kale, onions, peas, potatoes (new and second early), raspberries (summer), redcurrants, runner beans, salad leaves, shallots, strawberries, tomatoes, whitecurrantsSowing Now
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