At the end of February I sowed my first seeds direct into the allotment, and covered them with a net tunnel. A month later and they’ve started to come up!
The thin wispy leaves in the foreground are carrots, middle-right is mixed salad leaves, and the back row in Butterhead lettuce.
This is the first year I’ve had the allotment from winter (I only moved in April last year) and the first time I’ve grown salad or carrots there. You can see the ground is very dry – we’re having a very dry winter/spring – so I’m pleased they’ve worked at all. And that the netting has protected them from hungry birds and rabbits (so far).
This is a view of the allotment surrounding my new salad tunnel.
I’ve dug over the ground around it, in fact North helped me with that as some of it had been paths last year and needed a heavy attack with a pick axe. He also helped me colonise some of the back area of the allotment on the other side of the cherry tree, which you can see in the background in the photo above. I’m going to put potatoes in those beds this year to help break up the ground, which has a lot of roots, some probably belonging to the cherry tree, which I’m hoping I’m not going to damage. I’ve spread manure over the dug over ground to try to suppress weed growth and add some nourishment.
The only vegetables I ‘overwintered’ this year are these massive sprouting broccoli plants.
Unfortunately they got partly eaten by mice a few weeks ago, so I’m probably only going to get half the harvest I should have had. The mice ate the little shoots that would have become the sprouting brocolli part, and left some poo behind – in case I was in any doubt whodunnit. It was maddening to think all the energy that went into these big plants (the trunks are thick and tall) would be wasted, but turns out the mice got full (or distracted) before they finished them off.
This is a photo of the beautifully coloured head taken a month after that first one (today). They’ve sprouted very nicely.
And picking them is a delight. My favourite way to cook sprouting broccoli is to brush it with olive oil and grill it. The leaves go all crispy (a bit like crispy seaweed you get in Thai restaurants) and the stalks and heads are tender and flavourful.
This next photo is of this year’s root vegetable patch. I’m trying to get organised this year and group vegetables by type, which makes crop rotation easier. I’ve sown carrots and beetroot seeds here and the middle rows will take parsnip seeds when I’ve finished getting the ground broken up.
You can see what I’m dealing with in terms of soil here: sowing seeds is difficult as you need ‘finely raked soil’. Those clumps are sometimes the closest I get! For the carrots and beetroots, I broke up the soil as best I could, then ‘imported’ some finer soil from other parts of the allotment (where I had potatoes growing, and the odd molehill also comes in handy too) and sprinkled that in a thin row just where I was to sow the seeds.
Back at home the windowsills are full with propagating seed trays and young seedlings. We’re having some unseasonably warm weather this week (we seem to have by-passed spring and gone straight to summer) so I’ve been moving them off the window-sills and out into the sunshine during the day.
In this photo there are tomatoes, brussel spouts, cabbages, spinach, onions and leeks, basil, parley and lovage. I’ve also sown some flower seeds for the first time, not because I’ve suddenly taken a fancy to non-edible gardening, but because of their pest repellent qualities. I’m growing marigolds to protect my tomatoes and nasturtium to protect my cabbages.