Saturday 29th March 2014

As it's Mothers day tomorrow and it's nice and Sunny I hit the allotment to get the last of the main crop potatoes in the ground. Half of bed 10 was covered in weeds - I cleared them last week  . So I finished off the edging to the plot and then got on my knees and weeded again, but hopefully for the last time for a while. After searching everywhere I found the weed membrane and cut some plastic to hold it down and filled some milk bottles with sand for the soft bricks.

In looking for the potato membrane, I found the strawberry so that's now on bed 5 holding back the weeds until I can get back to fill the holes with the strawberry plants currently in pots.

Bed covered I drilled the first 9 holes with the Augur a hand full of compost in each hole then place in a potato and then cover with compost then infill the hole with the soil that came out of it.  A break for a coffee with Keith and Pauline then on again with the second row of 9 potatoes.

In between the major job for the day as I pass the greenhouse, I have been placing the module trays in a seed tray of comfrey water, I've topped up all the pop bottle pots water reservoirs with water.

Looking at the beetroots there and now 12 out of 15 cups showing beetroots. so that's 5 more in 3 days.

I have to say it took longer than I thought it was going too but at least they are now in the ground. A old dog cage is sitting on top of it hopefully it will keep Basil Brush off

In addition 3 of the 100s and 1000s have germinated and are showing. It's 98 degrees in the greenhouse with the door open and god knows how hot in the growhouse in the greenhouse, so I have not zipped up the fronts, but must check the over night temperatures for the next few days. The little bent over white thing in the picture of the 100s and 1000s was standing up and showing two tiny seed leafs when I came away ...

I love watching things grow

In the afternoon, I had another sort of the seeds when I added the lambs lettuce that arrived from Premier Seeds and sorted out my excess of spring onion seeds into type and date order and I want to grow lot and lots of onions as we use them every week.

So another tray of 15 vending machine cups with twin drainage holes filled with Ishikura spring Onions are now sitting in a 15 module tray liner in the cold frame ready to explode (very slowly knowing onions) into life and ultimately join their White Lisbon brothers down on the allotment.

Reading the back of the packet - (yes I do!) they are a revolutionary onion that does not form a bulb (so I'm going to call them Che Guevara from now on )  yet they stay white and very straight. They can be harvested  pencil-thin or thinner (why would you want too ?) or left to mature to carrot-size (so they become a leek then?) The long harvest period means one sowing lasts the whole season! (so does that mean my idea of successional sowing Spring Onions has just gone out the window?) 

I also want to get in some  "Furio" Red Onions, Shimorita, Winter White Bunching, Ram Rod and Feast F1 Hybrid.

Then in the evening when dropping off my daughter Kelly to the pub to meet her mate, I stopped off at the Co-Op and picked up 14 round Flower Buckets as they have shed loads because of Mothers Day and then TESCO who now inform me that they recycle theirs but still let me have 7 of the square buckets 3 short and 4 long, that fit so nicely in the greenhouse. I realised that putting in the early potatoes in the ones I had meant that I would not be able to use them for the tomatoes later.

There will be a hole burning exercise on Sunday    and I need in the next week to go and buy one or two of the very large B&Q 125L sacks of verve compost again.