A game of chess on the plot!
I’m juggling plants as they wait to be planted into the borders
Life in the greenhouse is rather crowded as many crops are ready to be moved to their new home but I have to be patient! This means my borders, which should now be housing tomatoes, are still full of trays of plants. I’ll soon have no alternative but to juggle them about to get these toms in. It’s like a complicated game of chess in there as various trays are moved about!
It only seems a short while ago that road verges and hedgerows were a blaze of yellow as dandelions filled every vacant space. This colour has now faded and remaining are those balls of fluffy seeds heads just waiting for a gentle breeze to carry them away. Soon the air will be filled with millions of umbrella-shaped seed floating around looking for a new location to colonise. So gardeners beware, for despite the pretty appearance of the dandelion, you won’t want them taking up residence on your plot. These deeprooted plants aren’t easy to get rid of when established, so have the hoe at the ready to repel these unwanted invaders!
With most winter vegetables under way there’s just one more to sow – swede. I’m using a variety called ‘Invitation’ as it’s club root-resistant and also has resistance to powdery mildew. I don’t sow seed directly into the soil as the flea beetle loves to nibble the seed leaves and slows the progress of the plant. I fill a 24-compartment tray with good compost and sow two to three seeds in each compartment at a depth of 2cm (¾ inch). These are watered, then kept in the greenhouse to germinate. Seedlings are thinned to one per compartment and allowed to grow into a sturdy plant before planting out in the brassica patch.
In the greenhouse, I’ve removed part of my staging to make room for my Octogrow, which is a self-watering tray holding eight large pots. These pots are half filled with well-rotted manure then filled up with good compost. This is home for my peppers, which are grown up off the ground to make them warmer and easier to look after. The young peppers are planted out in each pot and then it’s the long wait for the first harvest!
At last my ‘Golden Acre’ cabbages are large enough to go out in the brassica patch. These are supposed to be my first harvest in early June but this year’s topsy-turvy spring has thrown that target off course. Still, they’ve made large plants in their 10cm (4in) pots so I might get them to speed up. At last I’ve a chance to sit down for a while from the busy plot and transplant my leek seedlings into a full-sized seed tray. These were sown some weeks back and I was beginning to despair they wouldn’t germinate. They did eventually but not ‘Mammoth’ so I’ll have to make do with ‘Below Zero’ and ‘Musselburgh’ for my winter needs. I transplant these as 35 per tray and grow them to pencil size before planting out.