Bank Holiday Weekend

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Hi Folks
Well it has been Bank Holiday Weekend here in England, and most gardening folk tend to start getting their bedding plants in for the summer, some of ours have been in for quite some time being as the weather has been so nice we have had some wet days, and today it is a wet one not that I am complaining as we need it, we have finished putting in the rest of the bedding plants so now it is down to nature to do the rest with a little help from us, My other half has planted all her flowers in the plant stand that I bought her so I will give it a few weeks and when it is properly in flower I will post some more pictures for you to see,

In the veg garden everything seems to be going well, we have a lot of flowers on the courgettes so it looks like we are in for a good crop of them for this year, when we have been out shopping at Morrison’s our local supermarket, several times I have seen grapevines on display for sale, they are well grown in pots and have got small bunches of grapes on but not ready to pick, I have been tempted to buy one quite a few times, well temptation got the better of me the other day so I bought one, it is now planted in the veg garden at the side of the strawberries, so I will keep you updated on my progress, growing grapes is not new to me, as a few years ago I took over a piece of land that had a glasshouse on it and there was a grapevine in it, don’t know what variety it was but it was a black grape and the fruit was very nice, in fact it must have been so nice that on the last year before we left the site someone broke into the glasshouse and stole all the grapes, it was rather funny when I first took over the allotment I knew nothing about grapes so when the fruit started to form on the vines I didn’t know what to do next so I asked the guy who sold it to me how I needed to carry on to producing the fruit and he touched the side of nose and said it was a secret and left me to it, so I asked someone else on the plots if they could help and they told me the secret of producing good bunches of grapes, anyway later on in the year I had grown some really good sized lettuces and the same guy came up and said to me my you have got some good sized lettuces on your plot how do grow them like that I touched my nose and said trade secret, actually it was no trade secret as every year I used to dig out the bottom of my glasshouse and threw all the old compost on to the lettuce patch and dig it back in and add a little fish blood and bonemeal , and the secret of growing grapes is to only have a bunch every foot or so and prune out every other grape on the bunch to give them all room to grow, making sure you don’t touch them with your bare fingers, as the sweat on your fingers can get on the grape and cause it go bad as you take the protective coating off the grape, you can use fine pointed scissors to do this, not sure how they go about it in the commercial world,

Right I will now pop down to the glasshouse and see how the toms and the peppers are coming on, I sowed more mustard cress yesterday that is really nice with a salad better than the supermarkets, and I sowed more radishes, and I have some cos lettuces to plant out can’t see me doing that today as it still raining .

• 27 May, 2009
• 6 likes

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