Signs of Spring

You wait for ages and then two come along at once

Two lamb roast dinners this weekend that is! The first with Mum and Les and the second with Sally and Tony. We were also able to visit the plot both days due to the much nicer weather than of late. Saturday was glorious and we saw Brian in his garden in the morning. He was trying to get Peppy to pee before they all set off for their few day's holiday in Wales. She was more intent on squeezing herself through the trellis and getting into our garden though. We are looking after the two pusscats while they are away. We were planning to go to Blanchfords to buy a scaffold board but Brian told us to help ourselves to one from a pile in his garden. Yay! We went to Blanchfords anyway and bought a 4m length of guttering to start the peas off in. Lee sawed it up into 3 sections so it would fit onto the staging in the greenhouse.

Bill was at the allotment getting started on his new plot. He'd hired a turf cutter and was using it on 6 beds that he'd carefully marked out on the old parking area. Richard has actually made some progress with the huge bramble bush. He's chopped it right back and created one clearly defined row with a path alongside. This means we can claim back some land which should be part of our plot now it's not covered in the monster! The width of our plot is 6.90m at the top (shed) end but only 5.90m at the other. It's going to be a real pain to dig out all the fencing. Lee wants to create proper raised beds at the same time. He'll use scaffold boards (we're going to save up!) and make all the beds the same size. That's us busy in the winter then!

Lee dug another bag of sand into the onion bed and created a ridge into which I planted the 'Golden Gourmet' shallots. We were able to use the scaffold plank to avoid stepping on the still rather claggy soil. Lee got the remaining parsnips up. There were some really good ones! I think they were 'Countess' that I'd planted half a row of in the brassica bed (bizarrely!) last year. They weren't too badly forked - some were perfect, and they were all large. We did a bit of weeding but there weren't too many at all. I'm sure they'll all start appearing once the soil warms up. We cleared Big Whitey's tyres of the remaining carrots. They were a bit mankey so they went onto the compost heap. The bag of mixed daff bulbs I planted in the 'new' flower bed alongside the fence by the autumn raspberry cage are all sprouting up. The annuals I planted in there too are also looking good. There are lots of nigella seedlings and a few nice little rosettes of poppy. Oddly the escholtzia aren't appearing in any great numbers as yet though.

We gave Bill a lift back to his house with the turf cutter when he'd finished. I had to sit right in the back of Big Whitey which was fun but a bit breezy! While we were at Mum's for dinner in the evening we picked up another scaffold board that she'd found in her garage. Much fun was had by all playing 'Pass the Pig' and 'Uno'.

We popped back up to the plot on Sunday and planted some Nanteeeeez seeds (yes, they were actually Nantes 2!) in two big plant pots in the greenhouse. Hopefully we'll have some baby carrots for May. It's lovely pottering about in the greenhouse with the radio on - so warm and cosy! Ian and his wife were up there moving the carpet off their plot. It's piled up and she's threatening so burn it all over the Easter weekend, which will be 'nice' (sigh...). She's trying to organise a second tap for near their plot and wanted to know if we'd 'chip in'. I said it depended on how much it was. Lee and I are perfectly happy with the one supply that's already there really. Apparently Ken has pinched more of their plot than they'd intended when they 'sub-let' to him - norty Ken ;-)

We went over to Sally and Tony's in the afternoon and paid a visit to Hilltop Garden Centre in Ramsden. I didn't buy anything but was tempted by some yellow and lilac primula, a schweeet box (Sarcococca confusa) and some gladioli bulbs. Sally gave us a load of books that she'd picked up from the Blackwells. Amongst them was a 1969 edition of 'The Joy of Cooking'! Another absolute classic for my fusty old cookbook collection.

We had a bit of a tidy up in the back garden. I pruned the two clematis that need doing down to about 30cm. We are planning on either buying or making some trellis to go along that fence for the clematis. We also need some for the new rose in the corner by the shed. We cut both the large ferns down now that the worst of the cold is over (hopefully!)  and I gave both of the hateful euonymous a serious hacking. With a bit of luck the feckers will die now - nya ha haaa! The lovely dicentra shoots are poking up amongst the euphorbia. Everything else is still looking quite sleepy though apart from the hellebores and snowdrops. I eventually got round to investigating the hellebore seedlings that I grew from seed from Ashwood Nurseries back in July 2007! They were incredibly pot bound. I should have potted them on about a year ago - whoops! I disentangled some as best I could from the pot containing the purple selection and have plonked them into the bed between the acers and the new rose - currently a cat toilet. I placed some sweaty cube shelves over the seedlings to prevent feline harassment.

The great parsnip experiment is progressing to plan. Over 30 seeds had germinated by Friday afternoon so I filled some deep rootrainers and carefully placed three seeds to each module, 2cm deep. They were then placed outside in the sweaty cubicle. I added fresh seed to the tupperware box. A further batch had germinated by Sunday and joined their chums in the rootrainers. The snapdragons and diascia are looking pretty lame. The diascia are about 5mm tall and look like they're going to keel over at any minute. A very few snapdragon have germinated. They are even smaller and are equally feeble looking. Perhaps I'll try again in a few weeks when the days have lengthened. I got hardly any seeds in each packet though and used about half in this first attempt. Perhaps Nicky's Nursery seeds are crap and I should buy some new seed from elsewhere.

I took some photos of the garden. I'll try and remember to upload them tonight.

Warming up at last?

It seems like the snow and incredibly low temperatures have relented for now. The Gardeners World site is predicting temperatures of up to 10°C during the weeks. I've got quite a few things on the go since I last wrote. Last weekend I sowed snapdragons and diascia. They're in small pots and I had placed them in the heated propagator. The diascia have produced 3 tiny seedlings but nothing's happening with the snapdragon as yet. I've taken them out of the propagator this evening as I think it's keeping them at too high a temperature. The packets recommend 20°C, which is room temperature when the central heating is on. I had no luck with snapdragons last year. They succumbed to damping off when they eventually germinated. I initially watered the compost with Cheshunt Compound this time though, so here's hoping!

The sweet peas in the sweaty cube have been getting pretty leggy so I gave them the chop today. They were joined by some lettuce and other salad leaves that I had sown last weekend. Most of the lettuce had germinated. They are in a 40 plug seed tray. Today I resowed the empty modules. The Wilkos seed had the best germination rate – 100%. Better than T&M and Franchi! I also sowed some summer purple spouting brocolli last weekend and placed them straight into the snow bedecked sweaty cube. No germination as yet. We visited Wilkos in Aylesbury yesterday. All the Christmas tatt has gone and the full range of garden stuff is in again. We bought a couple of cat litter trays for starting off leeks – as recommended by DD on allotment.org.uk! 

Yesterday I started the great parsnip experiment. Stage one is chitting the seed. I put some kitchen paper in a tupperware and moistened it with a water spray. Then sprinkled some seed on top before topping it with more dampened kitchen paper. The sealed box is now residing on top of the radiator cover in the lounge. The plan is to pop 3 chitted seeds to each module in a rootrainer when the time is right.

The potatoes are chitting at last! The shed was so cold that their dormancy wasn't breaking so we moved them to the spare room. Plus, it's been invaded by mice in there. They nibbled at 3 of the Charlotte seed potatoes! There were loads of poos under the potato sacks, which are themselves showing signs of mouse abuse. We've set a 'Big Cheese' trap and baited it with peanut butter but no success as yet, one week on. I had a little bit of a tidy up in the shed this afternoon mainly so I could assess the pot situation. We have tonnes of the things! We've decided we'll sow some carrots in one of the huge pots in the greenhouse next weekend.

In the garden, some things are looking a bit sad after the snowy onslaught of the last fortnight. The Mathiasella has been truly battered. Its newest shoots have snapped under the weight of snow. I can only hope it recovers in the spring. I wonder if the two dahlia I left in the ground have survived. We did mulch them, in the Autumn, with quite a thick layer of horse manure but somebody's been digging around that area quite frequently. Hmmmm. The hellebore have come into bloom for the first time. Only one flower open at the moment but there are lots of buds. The snowdrops are flowering, I'm sure this is much later than last year. 

Roads not getting any better and a visit from Mr Burns

A view of our ice-rink-esque road early this morning
After Sunday night's snow dump and the resulting chaos in the South, the roads on my route to work are still pretty hairy in places. The car did a little skid when I braked on the road up at Wheelers End last night and Wheeler, Bolter and Lane End are still very icy this morning. The duck pond in Lane End is frozen solid.

We had a visit from Mr Burns today. Everybody else had work-related conversations but we ended up talking about chocolate cake, Tony Hart and Benny Hill. Apparently David Cameron chose 'Ernie the Fastest Milkman in the West' as his first piece of music on Desert Island Discs. I can think of nothing to follow that really…

Garlic

We paid the plot a visit on Saturday. It was incredibly cold. We added some kitchen waste to the compost heap and I took some pictures of the overwintering onion sets and the garlic that were planted on October 11th and 12th 2008 respectively. The garlic's looking great! All the varieties are sprouting up now, Purple Wight doing the best and German Red still being very slightly patchy. The onions are still quite weeny and some have been plucked out since we were last there. I was quite surprised as I would have thought they were well rooted now but there are obviously some real hooligan birds about!

We bumped into Ken who has been making great progress on his plot. He's built the frame for a huge fruit cage around the area where the big daisy clump is currently. He's also dug the back end over and covered it with a tarpaulin to keep the weather off. Bill doesn't look to have made any progress with digging his second plot yet.

Here are the alliums:

Left Row: Solent Wight; Centre Row: Purple Wight; Right front half row: German Red; Right back half row: Blanak

Electric and Yellow Senshu overwintering onions

Mmmmmm, seed porn!

Geese

Wow! Check them there geese out. I sent them straight from my mobile to this blog. Clever huh? That's it really. Just wanted to check it worked. Oh yes, they are the geese from the farm shop on Saturday!