April Allotment planting

The Easter weekend was all about peas. First, the sweet peas went in around their bean-wam. These are a mixture of saved seed, F1 hybrids (some kind of charity seed that helps fund support for returning soldiers that I got talked into buying in the allotment shop) and the last of the year before’s cottage garden highly-scented pastel seed. Should at least make for an interesting display.

The bean-wam is in the middle of the herb bed - last year it ended up being used for borlotti beans because we simply ran out of usable soil on 201. We had nearly a quarter of the allotment unused but as it hadn't been dug for years, there was little point trying to plant it until we'd dug and fed it. This year the borlottis are going where we had potatoes last year, the potatoes are breaking up the ground that wasn't used at all in 2009, and the bean-wam will host the sweet peas this year and next year maybe I'll have a proper herb planting in there. Maybe.

Then it was real peas. 320 of them. There are both Meteor and Feltham First but in this picture you can only seethe back lot (Meteor) and the front row, still to be planted, are entirely are Feltham First. They are also the result of successional sowings – the ones you can see at the left-hand end of the picture went in two weeks before the ones that you can't see, at the far right. We still have all our maincrop peas to sow yet, but they go directly into the ground.

Our early peas get sown in toilet roll inners because of mice, but the maincrops don’t seem to suffer so much – probably because there is so much else for them to be nibbling on that a few peas aren’t as enticing as they are earlier in the year when there’s no variety to the rodent diet.

The radishes are up (the parsnips aren’t, not worried yet though) and the first of the beetroot are up too. All in all it’s looking properly springlike on 201 at last!

Labels: allotment-peas, allotment-potatoes, allotment-sweet-peas