June 2009 update

Following the first garlic harvest, we have now removed all the japanese onions, shallots and a further 2 beds of garlic. This year the Solent Wight garlic has been a bit of a let down as the bulbs are rather small. The japanese onions have produced an impressive crop with some real whoppers amoungst the harvest. With the first bed of onions we made a large batch of onion and balsamic vinegar chutney. The second bed are drying in the greenhouse.



In addition, the greenhouse and garden are coming along nicely.

Chillies



Tomatoes, Cucumbers and Sweet Peppers



More Chillies!



Various flower borders









Koi Pond

It's full steam ahead in the growing season...

The climate of rain followed by sun is suiting many of our crops. The early potatoes planted on plot 4 are now ready. Today we harvested the first few 'charlotte' plants and the remaining 'rocket'. Below you can see some of our charlotte harvest.


The rocket are larger in size.


Earlier in the week I decided to 'bite the bullet' and plant out some of the chilli plants in the raised bed on the patio. The patio has full sun all day and chillies have previously done well in pots here. Time will tell whether we will get a good outdoor chilli crop. The remaining chilli plants will be staying in the conservatory.

The tomato plants, planted in pots on the patio, are doing very well. Shown below is an unsual looking tomato flower. These are a 'brandywine' variety.




Yesterday we also harvested our 'over-wintered' onions. We have about 30 large onions.

Tomatoes and garlic

A quick trip down to the plot last night and we planted some of our spare tomato plants through a small hole in the weed suppressant membrane.

They survived the night and with a few days of sunny weather forecast we will see how they fare.

On our shared plot the garlics and onions are doing fine, so all that was done there was a bit of tidying. The edges were strimmed and where necessary defined with a spade to give them a straight(ish) edge.

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.