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January 2007 |
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New navigation icons for New Year. I´ll see how they work!
The Site Home page will now be indicated by the anemone, the weather/rainfall page by an animated gif courtesy of the kind chaps at Metcheck who have given me permission to use theirs, and the allotment index by a watering can. Hopefully this´ll be fun, and introduce a little colour to the top banner without stopping the site from being simple to read. The only frames will still be cold frames! |
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Monday January 1st, 2007
New Year Resolution - to grow larger onions. I´m determined to get some this year that don´t look like rejects from a pickle factory so am following the advice given by MedwynWilliams. If he doesn´t know his onions, then who does? Anyway, he has this to say on the subject of sowing them. Don´t want show onions, just decently-sized ones to eat, and since I usually get whopper leeks from an early sowing, I have hopes. So I sowed a trayful of Bedfordshire Champion seed in the heated propagator according to Medwyn´s instructions. Chose this one because they´re supposed to be a good flavour and store well, and also be large globe-shaped bulbs.
I guess time will tell! |
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Sunday January 7th
Onions coming up all over the place. First ones came up on Thursday and now there´s a lot up - at least 50. Am leaving them in the propagator until it looks like it´s growing grass, then I´ll see about transplanting to modules. So far only a couple of the early ones have straightened out. Not much else to do given the weather is so wet! |
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Wednesday January 10th
The onions are going great guns now. Pity that I´m not - seem to have got acute arthritis according to the GP, though if it´s chronic (long-lasting) will depend on tests. I will be heartbroken if I can´t do my lottie, but my decision to set up the plots for no-dig raised beds may be prescient. I will not be giving up easily. |
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Saturday January 13th
The mini-greenhouse for hardening off stuff at the house fell over last night in the gale and so one of today´s jobs was to get the wood glue out *again*. That greenhouse falls to bits if you sneeze on it and I´m losing count of how many times I´ve glued it. Well it won´t in future. I knocked panel pins through the tongue and groove joints after glueing them. It´s now attached to the fence with gate hooks and eyes.
Fence´ll probably blow down now. |
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Finally made it up to the plot, though the weather was drizzly. Luckily better than of late, though it´s all supposed to come back again later. The fine enviromesh was trying to escape, and with Tony´s help, it´s now folded up and put away. The carrot mesh just got put back over, and I have a feeling it´ll blow off again. Spotted a huge carrot and pulled it. Also noticed the tops of some parsnips were larger than I remembered, so they must have continued growing. Excellent. Dug a couple and they were really rather nice. The tipped-over butt is full again, so washed the `snips. Then got a cabbage (they are all still looking decent too) and decided against leeks. Looks like roast parsnips tomorrow. The Elwesii snowdrops are out (as usual - they´re always out in January) and given the weeds surrounding the apple trees, I shall have a battle on soon to get them out! Forecast is ambiguous for tomorrow, so we shall see. If it´s awful, I´ll be pricking out the onions. |
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Sunday January 14th
At long last - a decent day! Split it between the house, the dump and the allotment, and we are now several bags of (mostly recyclable) rubbish the lighter. Several of the compostables were in buckets which had spent the past few weeks drowning in the rain, and smelt rather incredibly awful. If I have mice in the compost dalek, I hope they have no sense of smell. Managed to lug the garlic up to the plots, almost getting there when a woman came out of a side road and caused me to have to brake suddenly; the dead log roll ended up on one garlic tray. I was not happy, and she had the grace to look sheepish as I shot out of the car and rescued the squashed plants. Only 3 or 4 are really bad, none are severed and they´ve been shored up with soil. Meanwhile I have now got 68 sound ones planted, plus the squashed ones, so we should be ok for garlic again. Roots were a bit constricted for my liking, but better in the soil than out. Nice to have a planted bed at last. |
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Saturday January 20th
After the worst gales for 17 years on Thursday, it was with some trepidation that I went up to the plot, half expecting to find myself with either no apple trees or no shed. Luckily all were still upright, though I had to go chasing compost bin lids, and peg down the broccoli netting again. Dug some parsnips and some leeks, though wished I´d actually had gardening clothes on rather than my normal boots and coat! Muddy. The excellent news for today is that I´ve had a letter |
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from Brogdale: they have identified my eating apple as a Spartan, which makes perfect sense. Least if it had blown down, I would now know what to buy to replace it! It´s a Canadian cultivar, and I agree with all the descriptions online. I´ve still got perfectly edible ones in storage.
On the downside, thanks to the storm I´ve now got no usable shed at home, thanks to an unfortunate encounter with a now very-horizontal tree. No idea when it will be fixed, I guess it depends when the insurance company deign to get back to me and organise a claim assessor. The good news is that I will now (after a lot of faffing, probably) get to have a proper potting shed instead of what we´ve taken to calling the comedy shed, considering the previous houseowner had built it round the tree, with no proper foundations, and gaping holes everywhere. The back garden was already being reshuffled: now it´s going to be an even bigger job (the tree even smashed the foundations of the old 6´x4´ shed) so I suspect that my presence at the allotments will suffer for a while once they get going. At last I´ll have a decent, dry storage place that doubles up as a greenhouse and doesn´t lean worse than the Leaning Tower of Pisa! |
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Saturday January 27th
Ryton Potato Day. After last year´s foray to Whitchurch, went back to Ryton with Chris, as they seem to have better talks etc. during the day. Sadly though, they seem to have dropped a lot of their activities too. Instead of the `How to grow´ talk and the `Pests and diseases´ talk, there was one on garden grabbing (their latest `cause´ - a worthy one, but not potatoes...) and a very interesting one on current breeding programmes on blight and pest resistant strains and cookery demos. Missed the Q&A sadly, as it was scheduled over lunchtime.
The actual potato stampede was much worse than previous years - in future I shall attempt to get Kestrel before anything else, as I got the last two, and they´d only been open about 10 minutes. I couldn´t believe it. Got Ospreys to make up the numbers. Split my Sárpos this time - 6 Axona as well as 6 Mira, to see if there´s much difference. Also split the 1st early salad potatoes. Got my hands on Royal Kidney again (I like them better than International Kidney) but only 6, and the other 6 are Charlotte. Usual large number of Red Duke of York and Picasso, but swapped Anya for Pink Fir Apple (earlier: might beat the blight!). For pots, I got Home Guard (now there´s an oldie!) and Maris Peer. And they had Highland Burgundy Red and Salad Blue again in the ware potato section, and like before, I´m risking planting them. Must have my Christmas roasties! Chris does have spare seed potatoes from her salad blue microplants, so I may just keep the blues I bought as reserves. Either way, the row replaces Ratte, which has once again failed to grow well for seed growers. Mine were lousy too last year. I might know why though. Having had a chat with Alan Romans (another perk of the Ryton day) he thinks the symptoms I got (tiny, bare-stemmed plants) are typical eelworm signs. Not entirely connected with him plugging something which can remove most of it - I asked about what eelworm looked like before confessing about the Rattes, which are apparently very susceptible. Anyway, this funny plant (another solanum) triggers eelworm hatching but doesn´t allow it to form overwintering cysts, and handily, the plants are spiky. We liked that! Defence against eelworm and two-legged pests in one!
Had a wander around the garden - looking a bit beat-up after the storm, then I cracked and bought a couple of Lady Balfour, which according to the chap on the blight and disease resistance talk, is about the best for organic growing that there is.
The one blessing is that I think I´ve bought fewer than last year... just as well, since I´ve no conservatory space to chit them, thanks to it now containing most of the shed!!! |
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Sunday January 28th
Spent a few hours pricking out onions. Now have 120+ Bedfordshire Champions in modules. They can stay in those for some time, at least until a decent root system has formed. Sowed another 80 onions, some Sturons that I found at Ryton, and would have sown the leeks, except that I don´t seem to be able to find the packet. And Unwins doesn´t have them on their new website. I hope their catalogue still does! |
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