Allotment rain – at last, and tasks

Whee! After six weeks of nothing, our first real rain! Sadly, it’s accompanied by howling gales but you can’t have everything. At least our brassicas and lettuce will be getting a real soaking.

And at last we can stop going up every evening to water the peas. Our crop is going to be feeble anyway, we had only half a dozen pea plants and they got horribly wind-scorched before we got the windbreak up, but peas are, to me, the Faberge egg of allotment life – without peas fresh from the pod, the summer’s wasted. Of course we will need to go up again and check their supports, as this kind of wind could knock even a wrought iron terrace flat. They are just about ready for harvesting, so I’m keeping a very beady eye on them.

We’re also watching our radishes, which should be benefitting from this cool weather. We sowed another row last week and they are already showing two leaves, but I always think you can’t have too many radishes (and if you do, you can make cold radish soup, which is called poor man’s gazpacho in our house). As radishes will bolt if it gets too hot, we’re relatively pleased that this sowing is starting off in cool weather, as one school of thought argues that bolting behaviour is not just triggered by hot weather at the time, but may be a predisposition of hot weather at the time of germination. They only need water in July, never feeding.

And at the end of the month we’ll be sowing winter radish, spreading out the sowing period from late July to early September to ensure a supply over a long timeframe.

Labels: allotment-brassicas, allotment-lettuce, allotment-peas, allotment-radishes

April showers, peas and pods

Everybody always tells you that early peas can be sown outside from mid March right through to June, but we had that ‘gardener’s gut feeling’ this year that kept us from early sowing, even though we’re on the south coast. And a good thing too, given that frosts and floods have kept us busy in the last two weeks of March! Now we are starting to sow successionally, and using varieties which are both earlies and maincrops, but specifically that do well in Sussex, as the first couple of years of pea harvest here have us the unhappy experience of ‘empty pod’ which is apparently a problem with some varieties here.

Because pea plants can cast quite a shadow over smaller vegetables, we’ve adopted the clever idea of Bert’s Pyramids – allowing us to have lots of plants in good sun with their shade being cast into the pyramid’s interior! Making pyramids from cane isn’t particularly difficult, much to our surprise.

Labels: allotment-empty-pod, allotment-peas, allotment-pyramids