Gardening Club: Cabbages and Cauliflowers

With the bottom half of the polytunnel looking relatively tidy, greenhouse in situ and the top shelf of the other greenhouse frame (aka staging) now completed, using the metal tubes Mud had fixed and a spare mesh shelf section, I decided that the main wooden staging needed a radical sort out. There were still several trays of salad leaf seedlings, a lot of which were now bolting, sitting on it, making the place look really untidy, as well as the trough of peas and the remaining 5 chilli plants.

I moved the chillis from the deep tray in which they were standing and the trough of peas across onto the newly formed top shelf of the staging by the door, using the weight of the trough to help keep the chilli plants secure.

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Caterpillars are not included …….

lettuces and Chicory (Endive)

…… in my plans for my Brassica and lettuce bed which I’ve planted up this morning. I took the last of the baby broadbeans off and then composted the plants. The beans had been sown as a green manure and had never been intended to be a serious crop but with the very late arrival of Spring, if it ever did arrive as I personally feel we skipped straight into Summer from Winter, the beans were produced much later than I had anticipated but then everything else was way behind where it should have been, so that wasn’t really an issue.

Today, however, the beans had to make way for my only surviving cabbages (2 of them), 10 or so Kohl Rabi, 6 Lollo Rosso Lettuces and 3 Chicory (or Endive).

Time for a bit of gardening

Vegetable garden at the start of the afternoon

I awoke at 4.30 this morning to the sound of significant rainfall and the realisation that, actually, we haven’t had much in the way of rain for the last few weeks, not even in the form of snow. Then I closed my eyes and went back to sleep. A couple of hours later and although the heavy rain had ceased, we were still experiencing showers and I realised that if, as forecast, the rain stopped late morning, then the soil in the beds would be ideal for planting by mid afternoon and I gleefully pulled out my carrot, parsnip and beetroot seed packets in anticipation of a couple of hours hard graft in the vegetable patch.

Discovering the green

As I have mentioned before, I find the time between sowing seeds and the first signs of seedlings almost unbearable and can be found checking propagators and vegetable beds on an hourly basis, in my hunt for signs of life, for confirmation that my seeds haven’t failed en mass. As much as Mud is obsessive about his Land Rovers, so the same can be said about me and my seeds.So it is always with great excitement that I announce the arrival of the first of the seasons seedlings.

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.