One, two, three, four, five …….

Third lot of mangetout planted out

The “Oh for pities sake!!! Not again!!!” uttered by a supremely frustrated Mud last night, sent my heart plummeting to the soles of my feet, as I realised that this could mean only one thing – the internet was playing up again and that meant another phone call to the call centre … for me … first thing in the morning.

Mangetout

This is a record of how long this particular set of seeds took to germinate and how they looked at various stages from first appearance to the development of the first set of true leaves and beyond. I hope this will prove useful.

Variety: Oregon Sugar Pod
Sown indoors: 21st April2013
First Seedling: 26th April 2013
Germination: 5 days

I have now started this post three times and devoutly hope it will be a case of third time lucky. I have never had as much trouble with growing Mangetout, as I have this year and I have grown it successfully for 3 years now. First sowing was in the wrong compost and failed miserably. Second sowing did much better but as they grew taller, they folded in on themselves, for some reason and ended up with such huge creases in their stems that all but 2 have perished. I haven’t changed my growing technique at all, so I really have no idea as to why this happened. So here we go with batch number 3:

Mangetout – newly emerged

Mother Nature, Parsnips and Christmas

“I will have parsnips with Christmas dinner”, is  a phrase that will probably stay with me until the very end, along with the corresponding image of Mud attacking my parsnip bed with a wood axe, last Christmas, in an attempt to free the last of the parsnips. from the frozen ground He’d already managed to hack a few leeks out but Christmas dinner without honeyed parsnips was not an option.

On Muds’ express wish I had grown loads of leeks last year. The parsnip numbers, however, for some reason were a little low and those that had grown weren’t exactly over-sized (unlike 2009 where one root alone was the girth of a milk bottle and weighed in at 1lb 8 oz) but they were respectable and Mud was determined to ‘harvest’ some.