spuds planted along with a few early seeds...

Yesterday we took advantage of a dry day to get the potatoes in. We have opted for 5 varieties. 'Kestrel' has been very reliable for us, so 40 seed potatoes of these. In addition, last year 'International Kidney' (Jersey Royals) produced a huge crop. Surprisingly, these early potatoes when left were really tasty large maincrop spuds - so dual use. We also have done well with 'Anya' and 'Rooster' .

Pictured below is some of last years Anya crop as part of a sunday lunch pickings.



In a tester raised bed (6'x3') we are trying a small bed of 'Blue Danube'. These tubers have a deep blue/purple skin and have some alleged blight resistance.

A plague for all potato growers this disease is caused by a the fungus 'Phytophthora infestans'. The fungal spores spread in warm and humid weather - hence the typical British summer! This is the pathogen that was behind the 'Irish potato famine' and blight is a huge problem on our site. The fungus can lie dormant in any potatoes that are left in the soil overwinter. It is near impossible to remove every potato and on an allotment site this problem is compounded. A blighted potato crop can be destroyed in a matter of 24 hours. In reality it is a matter of 'when' rather than 'if' blight sets in across our site. If you are quick enough them cutting back the halms to ground level, letting the skins set and then digging up the tubers can save the crop. The main issue is that blight tends to rear it's head by the end of July. Maincrop spuds are often not well developed by this point, hence the reason the majority of our crops are 2nd earlies. We have found 2nd earlies can store well into spring.

I still haven't found room for the 20 Rooster tubers. These will have to go in over the next few weeks on our 2nd (shared) plot.

The potato crops have gone into four 10'x4' beds. Each bed has 20 seed potatoes in; packed in two rows of 10.

The Blue danube have been planted in our 'test' area. This is a series of 5 beds new for 2010 situated behind the flowerbed. These will be used predominately for a mini-rotation of new varieities we wish to test in small quantities. This year the blue danube will be joined by crimson broad beans, an unknown variety of garlic from our allotment shop and swedes which will trial planting from plug plants. For the root section of this rotation we are sticking with the firm favourites 'Boltardy' beetroot and 'Early nantes' carrots. The carrots, beetroot and broadies were also planted yesterday. Hopefully the weather will be favourable for germination!

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.

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.

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.

Rolling rolling rolling....

No, not Rawhide, but the base area for the shed. I spent the morning getting it level and then my plot neighbour Jim informed me there was a roller somewhere on the site that anyone could use.

20 minutes later and I had found it and trundled it back to our plot. That got the base nice and level and certainly made sure it was well compacted.

The next step was to lay the concrete bas, this came in the form of old concrete fence panel bits, we have used 4 and need to dig up 2 more from the abandoned plot. This was made much easier with Jims help.

Now to wait for the shed to arrive.

On our shared plot I also dug over, weeded and raked a bed for Sparkly to plant some extra carrots in. We also planted 3 rows of 'Minipop' sweetcorn.

Carrots and parsnips

One of the raised beds is devoted to carrots and parsnips. The parsnips were pre-chitted earlier in the year and then grown to seedling size in toilet roll centres. These were then planted into the raised bed a couple of weeks ago.

At the other end we put an extra layer of compost and sprinkled it with carrot seeds before lightly raking them over, known as broadcast sowing.

Well today they are all doing quite well.