The calm before the storm

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I haven’t been avoiding you all, it’s been a remarkably quiet week for me. The weather has been playing it’s usual tricks this week, it’s been remarkably windy up here in Yorkshire, especially at night. the days have been changable with one day being sunny and the next being wet, with the general conditions being gray and drizzly. Not really good gardening weather. So I have decided that there is no real point to do anything. I’ve picked a bit of spinach, banked up my second earlies and done some weeding, that’s about it this week. At home I sowed some lambs lettuce and some rocket.

Fortunately the rain means I don’t have to do any watering. The plants all look good at the moment. The garlic and the onions are growing nicely, the main crop potatoes are coming through,

the broad beans are all looking good and flowering, the peas are getting taller,

the brassicas are established, the spinach is cropping nicely, the spring onions are up, the carrots, parsnips and swedes are through and growing bigger every day, the turnips are a lot bigger,

the lettuce looks good and is coming along nicely, the herbs have improved considerable. You can definitely see the improvement in things. It’s almost as if you can look away and back again and things get bigger.

Fruit wise the strawberries are covered in flowers, with more and more coming out every day. I can’t remember seeing so many flowers on my strawberries before. They will need to be netted later in the year.

Now that things have started to get established I’ve finally completed my design for the plot and decided what I am doing with the last few square feet. I left a little bit so that I would be able to move things around, add more of some things and make the most use of the space that’s there. It really depends what grows and what I feel like I want more of this year.

I’ve left some space to put in a crop of peas in (the theory is to sow them in mid June, harvest in September/October when crops are a bit scarce but I’ve never sowed a second crop of peas so we’ll have to see what happens), some more rows of carrots and more lettuce. The rest is already planned for and allocated to the ever growing crops to be planted in the greenhouse.

Next weekend they will be going in, obviously that’s depending upon the weather.

The salad mix that I sowed in the terracotta pots are now nearly ready for harvesting. The spinach in the same sort of pot is through and coming along nicely. They should be ready in a month or so. This way I can have a lot of salad veg whenever I need them. Happy days.

The tomatoes are coming along nicely and are nearly at a stage to be planted out into grow bags, although they do seem a little small at the moment. When they get put into grow bags I’ll pot on the chilli plants as well into their final pots and let them go. So I have lots of things to do in the future, just not a lot to do now. Here’s to the future … and more rain this week

• 10 May, 2009
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