What's for dinner tonight?

This afternoon we harvested the broad beans. From a double 5ft row we managed to crop 3lb of beans.

For dinner we have some charlotte potatoes, broad beans, along with peas and baby carrots.

More peas

Tonight we decided to plant yet another row of peas. While Sparkly got on with that, I watered and took some pictures.

One of many rows of peas.
A pea pod, we tried one and it was very sweet, it's no wonder most peas don't make it to the pan when being picked and podded.
Another row of peas with runner beans in the background.
In between the peas we have a block of sweetcorn.

After picking most of the strawberries the other night, this one was looking a little lonely.
The raised beds are doing well, I have labeled the veg in the picture: leeks, sweetcorn, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, beetroot, lettuce, French dwarf beans.

There is green stuff growing, and its not all weeds

I'll let the pictures do the talking on this one....

Our first peas

Onions starting to swell up nicely

Summer cabbages
Sweetcorn
Aubergines
Potatoes
The shed

our first strawberrya view down the plot from the shed
French dwarf beans
Leeks
Beetroot and Radish
a peep at the parsnips

Beans and peas

Most of the plants are currently sitting at home in cold frames waiting to be planted. Although this weekend we were preparing the beds for where the broad beans and peas were going to go.

Luckily a fellow plotholder was on hand with his Mantis tiller rotovator and offered to let Sparkly have a go...


What a timesaver, easily done in 20 minutes, here you can see the broad beans and peas, we have planted some peas as well along the whole line, so hopefully they will grow at staggered intervals so we don't get a glut.

Here you can see the fine tilth produced by the rotovator, our compost dalek, a gooseberry bush and just where the spade is will be where we set up a bean wigwam.

Early seed sowings for 08

Sowing for this season started on the 9th January when we sowed 2 types of onion and our first sowing of leeks. The varieties we are growing this year are red brunswick and alisa craig. For leeks, we are going for a tried and tested variety, musselburgh. We sowed the seeds in a seed tray and pricked them out into individual toilet rolls 5 weeks later. The leeks are being kept together in one large pot, as these can be separated later for planting on the plot. The onions and leeks were transferred to the coldframe and have been growing slowly since! In addition, we have sown sweet peas, both saved seed (unknown variety) and sweet king blue on the 15th Feb, broad beans on 2nd March (imperial green longpod) and peas 13th March (kelvedon wonder).



In the conservatory we have planted chillies, aubergines and tomato. The aubergines germinated well without heat, but the chillies and tomato varieties faired better in a heated propagator.

We are growing a number of chilli varieties, ranging from the interestingly named 'ring of fire' to apache, which were very successful for us last year.



Pictured below are recently germinated tomato seedlings, which will be pricked out into individual pots over the next couple of days. All the varieties of tomato took 8 or 9 days to germinate in the heated propagator.

The aubergine seeds germinated within 1 week sowing and are growing well. We will be growing these in a greenhouse to be situated on plot four.