It’s been a while…
But here’s to a new start.
What’s been going on?
The peas and the broad beans both grew well, and tasted pretty good. The broad beans need more support than we gave them. The peas got in a complete tangle with their netting, which was over all three rows. It was hard to pick all of the peas. We’ve got some more peas growing now, with more upright netting, and one set of netting per row. We weren’t very good at picking either of these.
The cabbages are just coming to the stage where they look like edible. The broccoli was a complete miss - we got some tiny heads, but they very quickly changed to flowers. Don’t know what went wrong there.
We planted potatos, tomatos, runner beans, sweetcorn, onions, leeks, carrots, french beans, squashes, marrows and courgettes.
Potatos have gone well so far, we have been eating new potatoes for a week or so now. Either the foliage is starting to die off, of they are starting to succumb to blight - I don’t know.
Tomatos are just starting to get some fruit on them. We have a couple of rows in the ground and ten or so in grow bags - we will see if it makes any difference.
Runner beans are tasty and keep on coming. There are plenty in the freezer.
Sweetcorn are just starting to get ready - more of these and probably a bit closer together next year.
French beans have just gone in, hopefully not to late to have some by the end of the season.
Onions are getting there - some of them are ready for lifting and drying.
Leeks were late going in, but seem to be getting along OK. Hopefully they are a hardy variety that can stay in the ground over winter.
Carrots were even later going in than the leeks, but are coming along well. We managed to transplant them from a seed tray, which I don’t think you are meant to be able to do. They are surrounded by marigolds to keep the whitefly away - we shall see how that works.
Squashes were a bit small when they went into the ground, so took a bit of getting going, but are now well established. They are flowering now, and hopefully will start to produce a crop.
Marrows and courgettes went in the night before a frost, so got set back quite a lot. They survived though, and soon caught up - we are now swimming in the things. Next year - fewer plants, and maybe spaced out a bit more.
A row of garlic has also popped up - I’m not sure what they’re doing, or whether we’ll get some actual garlic from them. We had one clove of green garlic earlier on in the year - I wonder if we should have had the rest up and drying out at that stage.
We had plenty of strawberries off the plant that was already on the plot, and very tasty they were too.
And the plums on the plum tree are starting to ripen, though I think a lot of them are either going to be diseased or insect infected (as Rob found out - the hard way).
Our compost heap is producing some lovely compost. And the pavillion is still standing, though the roof sounds like it is going to collapse any day.
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I think the conclusions for the year so far are:
* be more organised
* starting plants off in trays on windowsills at home is a good idea
* and be more organised
There should be some more photos appearing in the gallery soon (see bottom of the page), and hopefully some regular updates will come along too!
