Seeds, Apples, Peas, Frosts

I ordered the seeds, exploding cucumbers, celtuce, asparagus peas and all. Even some lemon chilli seeds. And we don’t eat chillis so what I’m going to do with them I don’t know. Still, it’s all in a good cause, because if we don’t keep these older, odder, rarer species in cultivation, they won’t be there when we want them.

This picture shows the last apple on a neighbouring allotment’s tree. It’s Maurice’s allotment actually and whenever I pass it, I remember the old nursery rhyme ‘I had a little nut tree and nothing would it bear, but a silver apple and a golden pear’. Doesn’t it look lovely, if a little lonely …?

Experimental peas – 14 have germinated, but it’s just too cold to hang around and count which were pre-soaked and which weren’t, so I’m going to give it another week, buy which time any that are going to come up, should be up, and then work out if there was any advantage to pre-soaking.

On the plus side, the heavy frosts are breaking up our newly-dug soil beautifully. On the minus side, they stop us doing any more work because it’s just too damn cold to dig!

Labels: allotment-apples, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-peas, allotment-seeds

Allotment tasks for April

Assuming that you’ve already shovelled away the snow from your paths, that is! Given the unpredictability of the weather, this is possible the time to focus on the work that can be done indoors by giving the bulk of your attention to plants that can be sown now to germinate either in the greenhouse or on a windowsill at home. For me, this means pots of:

Aubergine
Celery
Outdoor Cucumbers
Tomatoes

And we tend to start off our tomatoes in a little bottom-heated propagator as we grow both the cherry tomatoes and the really big beef tomatoes which are so wonderful as a stuffed vegetable – and those latter get a better start with bottom heat which means we get bigger fruits come harvest time.

Neighbours of ours are daring to sow French beans under cloches outdoors, but I still think they’ve jumped the gun. You can’t sow French beans without some kind of weather protection until all threat of frost is passed, (early or late May, depending on where you live) but they won’t cope well with extremely low temperatures even under a cloche or polytunnel so I think that by waiting a week or two, we’ll get just as good a harvest as they will.


Allotment greenhouse courtesy of Beachcomber1954

Labels: allotment-greenhouse, allotment-seedlings