Allotment bad weather

We haven’t had any bad weather since we got our plot, but with tonight’s storm warnings in the South we are planning to get up there early in the evening and work out what we can do to protect our plants.

It was perhaps a bad idea to put two rows of lettuce seed and two rows of carrot seed into a bed on Sunday! But as we haven’t seen how germination operates in our soil, we thought we’d conduct a kind of ‘test run’ so that we have some idea whether seedlings damp off, get wind damage, how well the soil holds water etc. As I say, our timing may have been less than perfect.

Of course the rain, if we get any, will be welcome, because we’re watering just about every night now and with the hot sea breezes, most water seems to evaporate almost before it hits the ground, even at dusk, but storms are a different matter because they wash the soil away from a plants roots and strong winds with heavy rain can break leaves or even stems on smaller plants. So we’ll be bodging up rain protection systems (I’m pondering banging together some wood to make a kind of upside down V-shaped cloche just for the storm warning period) and hoping that not too much stuff gets washed away ….

Labels: allotment-bad weather, allotment-carrots, allotment-lettuce