More salad in the bath this evening. Rocket this time to add to the lettuce and endive.
The greenhouse is looking quite lush, plenty of tomatoes, peppers, chillies, and squash.
We are going to put the squash out (into what was the strawberry bed last year) in a couple of weeks time. We will build another of the tunnel cloches for them to keep them safe from the late frosts.
This evening we got the pea plants, which we had started off in the greenhouse, into their bed. 3 Ambassadors (and one seed in the ground to make it 4), 4 Starlight (with pale pods and dark leaves for easy picking), and 4 Kelvedon Wonder (an early). We also got 7 broad beans in, with another 5 or so in the ground to make it up to 2 rows.
We made a cloche for them with a wood frame we had (an abandoned cold frame attempt from last year) and some correx from the previous leanhouse™ covering.
Hopefully that will help them get acclimatised. They were in biodegradable pots, so there shouldn't be much root disturbance, and we have put the copper pipe frame around the bed in an attempt to foil the slugs again. It worked really well with the cabbages last year, so hopefully it will keep our little seedlings safe.
Mmmmm peas!
The light evenings since the clocks changed have made a big difference to our workrate.
The first job came from a windfall. The community group that has a plot on our site is doing a load of work at the moment, they have had some luck with funding and resource allocation, so will be making a big push to sort out the space we have given them, with our help. This means a certain amount of clearing of their plot, one of which has a lot of gravel in it. Our Secretary made sure that they weren't considering just throwing it away and we are now working at moving it around to where it is needed.
First lot he moved to a big boggy area on the main path, and then a second batch we wheeelbarrowed away to our Leanhouse™ to make a floor for it. It is particularly boggy there (one of the reasons for siting it there - the soil was too damp to use as a bed) but now it has a ground sheet down and gravel on top, to keep the weeds at bay, make it look a little neater, and improve drainage. There is still plenty of gravel though, so we will have to get some other uses for it going. Probably communal paths.
This also coincided nicely with us retiring some metal shelves from use at home, so we reconfigured those as Leanhouse™ staging, putting the shelves on the wrong way up to form shallow trays. They are the perfect size for grow bags and seed trays. They cost us a few pounds about 10 years ago, so we are definitely getting our money's worth!
They are almost full now a couple of days later, we have mixed salad, peas, beans, broccoli, kale, chard, lettuce, all sorts of stuff just sowed or as young seedlings, in there.
Also in are the potatoes, we have gone for Arran Pilots and Desiree this year. We used compost from our functional bath, the Bath o' Salad, to go in the trenches, and then refilled the bath with new stuff ready for lettuce seedlings, which are now in.
And then last night we did a bit of spring cleaning rather than planting. We had put the last of our home produced compost in an old broken bath which was sitting there and looking unattractive and taking up room, so I dragged out a black compost bin and transferred it all to that. The cracked bath is now in the skip. Once that was gone we rediscovered a metal arch underneath it, so that has now been installed in the middle of the 'flower' bed ready for sweet peas to climb up.
And the old strawberry plants have been transplanted from their overgrown bed to a nicely cleared new one. That leaves up clear to do some serious grass removal in that bed in preparation for the squash going in.
All in all it is coming together, I reckon a couple more evenings and we may have it in a fairly neutral state, with all the beds ready to go.
I've been a bit lax of late, in blogging here and in going to the allotment. But I'm back to it now.
We have actually been doing quite a bit, but it has been in our flat. We have a small heated propagator and several unheated ones that we have been starting everything off in, and it is turning into quite a production line now.
And several things have made it to the allotment already. Corn, courgettes, tomatoes (several kinds), aubergines, peppers, chillies.
We have also set off plenty of things in the greenhouse at the plot: lettuce of various kinds, including a salad leaf mix, scarlett chard, peas, broad beans, and various herbs and flowers.
Also yesterday I did a bit of DIY pot making. We received a parcel the other day that had tubes of paper scrunched up in it. It was perforated so that they could just tear off as much as was needed. As with most things these days we looked at it and asked 'do you think we could so something with that at the allotment?'. It turns out: biodegradable pots for beans/peas/sweet peas. They don't like root disturbance (their growth slows down for quite a while after being moved too roughly) so it is ideal to have a pot that they don't have to be taken out of when you move them on to their final location.
I separated the paper into a tube about 20cm long, twisted the base together and then turned the whole thing inside out so the twisted base was inside. I put a couple of beans in each, and also did some with 5 sweet pea seeds in each which can just get planted out whole when it gets warm enough.
We will see how they hold up, I'm hoping they don't disintegrate before I want them to!
