A new introduction to the patch this year, the sunflower bed is one of my favourites. The bees and insects love it, but as we let our bantams free-range the allotment quarter in the summer, once the seedlings are all established, they pretend they’re teeny jungle-fowl, like their ancestors, all Rambo style.
Of course, once they season’s over we’ll harvest the seed and either use it for ourselves, or it’s free bird food!
It’s that time of year when you really struggle to stay on top of the amount of food coming in. After a quick relax with a cold drink after picking it all, it’s back to the kitchen with the booty – today it was broad beans, and red and white curr
ants, with a cup of tea between tasks.
The day was empty, Suz was out to her regular ballet show, leaving Jay, Smiler and myself to while away some time. The sun was truly out, clear skies, no wind – perfect weather! We started out with sowing seeds -for greenhouse raising in the short term we sowed:
And propagators, to be sat on a windowsill inside, we sowed:
Then it was down the patch to sow a couple of raised beds with Lobjoit cos lettuce and Chantenay Red Core 2 carrots – last year the raised beds were free of carrot fly, so we’ll sow a couple of raised beds of these this year.
Tomorrow, if all goes well, it’ll be potatoes, onions, shallots and garlic that will go in. It’s a late start, but hopefully not too late!
By this time last year we have usually sown a fair but in the patch around the middle of March. This year absolutely nothing has gone in – the extreme cold has prevented us from doing anything outside – the grass isn’t growing, the ground is quite hard, and I have managed to dig only one veggie bed over. It is so cold we are still picking sprouts from the plants from last year and they taste great! The hedges and trees are still dormant, but at least the trees have had a good rest ready for this year’s fruit.
On the plus side we have a Light Sussex (Rosie) sat on a very small clutch. It seems like an age, over three weeks, but I candled one yesterday and it was solid, so hopefully something is going to happen very soon. We are stock-piling the eggs from our other Light Sussex (Daisy) ready for when she turns broody – but hopefully she’ll wait for more inclement weather before doing so.
The Pilgrim geese are laying like troopers, at least an egg a day from the two of them, sometimes two a day. We are very much egg-sufficient at the moment!
The jobs on the list are to sow tomato, sprout and cucumber seed as soon as possible – at least we can keep them indoors to start them off, with the stove burning away for warmth. Ridiculous!
The replacement trees are not the only thing to have changed from the original patch layout, so it’s about time I put an updated version online.
The main differences are:
Digging the path over means the annoying shorter plot south of the asparagus bed will be turned over to flowers this summer – sunflowers, nasturtiums and marigolds.
Despite the wet weather, we managed to grow three pumpkins, so at least Hallowe’en wasn’t totally bereft of scary faces…
The finished fruit cage in all its glory – new path, mulched with bark and trimmed strawberries. It looks so much happier!
Then we have the onions – these are last year’s winter onions (Japanese onions). The recent bad weather means those from seed are struggling to grow – it’s not looking good, I just hope we have a decent end of year.
The sprouts are doing well though!
Just a quick video of Suz, Jay, Smiler and Penny in the orchard, from a distance. As the camera pans around you can see the sheep we’ve borrowed to keep the grass down, the base for ‘The Barn’ laid ready (it’s a shed, in reality, but I have delusions of grandeur), then the slabs lain on weed supressing fabric between the raspberries and currants. This is mainly because it was a pain to mow inside the fruit cage, and it will help us keep weeds down as we now have clearly defined edges to mulch to. The entire fruit cage has been shift 2 feet so it now covers the strawberries (sorry Mr and Mrs Blackbird). There is no hardcore under the slabs – everything in the patch is done so that at any stage it can all be lifted and shifted, with nothing put down permanent. If this quarter ever needs to be put to grass again then we can move the entire lot to another place.
My father-in-law, Colin, mentioned that he’d seen a gardener trim their strawberries before the autumn set in, so this is what wev’e done. Apparently, with Indian summers you can get an extra late crop as well!
This is the first year that we’ve had reasonably sized currant bushes. We’ve lost one white currant bush, which we’ve had to replace, but the red currants have been fantastic! Here’s the crop we’ve taken this year – they are gorgeous!