Pottering in the (early) autumn sun

No real plan this morning, but after a couple of days of rain I thought a visit in the early morning sun would be nice, and there would be some hoeing to do as I had not been during the week. I have in my mind that I have ordered onion sets and garlic but not given it much thought of preparing the ground for them. I decided the onions will be planted out next to where the fennel is and ultimately when we plant out spring planted onions next year they will be there the fennel and carrots currently are. This bit of ground was not planted in this year but has had plenty of manure added and so after a small bit of weeding to get rid of new bindweed shoots, it was leveled off. I’ll plant the over winter onion sets here when they arrive later on in the week.

I also have the over winter onion seeds that that sowed a couple of weeks ago and have now turned into small plants. Not all of the seed germinated and I wonder if they will really be large enough to plant out in maybe a month’s time, but we’ll see. Having never done them from seed I’m not too sure how big they need to get. There is nothing to loose and so I’ll put them out in the middle of next month.

Also sown a couple of weeks ago were the spring cabbages and like cabbage seed seems to do very well, they have all germinated and I have a lot of small seedlings now showing four leaves each. I picked out four of them and transplanted into small pots. I’ll keep the remaining ones in the seed tray should I need them. Likewise, I’ll plant these out when they are a bit larger, hopefully around the middle of next month again.

The recent cold and bad weather has finished off a couple of the struggling cucumber plants, while at the same time has boosted the other cucumber plants. I came home with four cucumbers, I can add these to the other four cucumbers that have come off the plants at home.

I was going to pull a lot of the carrots which were planted late after the celeriac had been eaten or frazzled by the extra hot sun that we had for a couple of weeks during the summer. The carrots in the garden had not done that well and while we are pulling them from the garden, they are mostly small and baby like, still tasty though. Being sown quite late I expected the allotment ones to be the same and so pulling them all up in preparation for onions (and maybe freezing them) did not seem like a bad thing. Do this before it gets too cold, dark and wet, and slugs and other bugs eat them instead.

However, after pulling the first one it came out as a massive carrot, and so did the second one. I kept going and between normal orange ones and more fancy white, yellow and red ones, they were all very much large and proper carrot looking. I decided then to leave the others and take home the large ones I already had. It seems carrots have done better (late) at the plot than in the garden. A good job then that in desperation of loosing the celeriac, I sowed these. The bad news, the celeriac that did survive has been swamped by carrots!

A check on the over wintering peas and broad beans showed them all mostly showing. The pea line seemed to have a bit of a large gap in it, slugs I would think. The broad beans were all up. Planted out early for over wintering, a “make” of bean I’ve not grown before, I’ll see how these small plants get on when the temperature drops. Meanwhile I have ordered some Aquadulce Claudia broad bean seeds, the stable of (successful) over wintering beans that do really well each year.

While I was at it, I ordered some garlic too. No idea yet of where it will go, I have a couple of days before they arrive to think about a planting plan for the next year (and that new year starting next month really). I keep having to remember too that it’s not still March, the whole 2020 COVID year having been a bit of a fog.

I finished tidying up the compost area, I had to as I have six bags of rotted down horse manure for the garden that needs storing until the garden plot is empty for me to use it. Such things do not look good hanging about in a small garden, but an allotment plot it is almost mandatory.

After such a nice, warm, sunny, slow, morning, it was a shame that the afternoon was cloudy, cold and windy.

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