First carrots of the season

Today we picked the first carrots of the season. These miraculous survivers are Early Nantes planted on the 13th March. I say miraculous as this row had been hoed and these re-rooted themselves! These have been growing in a raised bed infront of the sweet pea trellis on the patio. When planting the sweetpeas the row was disturbed so I took the decision to hoe the lot and replant. Before I got around to replanting I noticed some of the seedlings had started to grow again! Probably less than 10% had managed to do this, but I decided to leave them as an experiment. The advice is never to transplant carrots so I am astounded that we actually got a crop. Some of the carrots have forked, but not all. They are finger size and we shall be having them for tea tonight! No carrot fly either, so in all an impressive result.

The sweet peas are in bloom

Over the last few days the first flowers on the sweet peas have opened. These are 2 varieties; 'Sweet King Blue' and some saved seed (unknown). The Sweet King Blue are an amazing colour.

First potatoes lifted

We had a patio barrel with Red Duke of York potatoes in it. They flowered about 3 weeks ago and we decided to lift them.


From just 5 seed potatoes, we got 5lb 4ozs of spuds. Not too bad really.

A HDR view of the plot

Whilst taking pictures tonight, I took 3 photos to try a HDR picture.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) is an image enhancing technique using 3 or more of the same photo taken at different exposures to get all levels of light and dark.

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.

First sets of garlic lifted

Having decided it looked like some of our garlic was ready we lifted the 3 rows of 'Purple Wight'.

After a couple of days drying you can definitely feel cloves.