April allotment watering and germinating

Yes, we’re watering already! I can’t believe, given how wet it was in March, how dry it’s been in April.

At home, in the greenhouse, we have peppers (courtesy of Len who germinated the seed and gave us the seedlings) and tomatoes.

Things that have come good in the past couple of days on the allotment:

• the shallots have decided to sprout, after I’d given up on them entirely
• the first earlies are popping out of their earthy mounds like mad things (or possibly like zombie vegetables resurrecting themselves, a scary image I really wish I hadn’t thought of, but it’s too late now, it’s in my head!)
• radishes – ready to harvest already!
• Parsnips – germinating in their own good time, but appearing (very slowly) on either side of the radishes.

What’s not so great …

• the beetroot seedlings, which are looking a bit spindly to be honest
• the carrots – doing nothing at all, we really struggle to get carrot seed to germinate on 201.

And our purple-sprouting broccoli has started to flower – a bit sad, as it makes the plant bitter and tough and inedible, but it looks pretty!

Labels: allotment peppers, allotment-crops, allotment-greenhouse, allotment-purple-sprouting-broccoli, allotment-tomatoes

Purple sprouting broccoli in January

We just, just, just managed to pick enough broccoli on 31st January to make a meal out of. The pigeons have obviously done better than we have from our overflow plants, but now the secondary shoots are appearing and the pesky birds seem to be leaving them alone (at least for now).

We also harvested a monster parsnip. I’m not sure how we managed to overlook this goliath and he’s got his shoulders a bit nipped, possibly by the frost that preceded the snow, but even so there’s enough on this baby to make a very good soup, which is great, as the weather’s turned cold again.

What we didn’t manage to do was get any shallots planted. This made it all the more galling to do our monthly tour and discover that many of our neighbours already have the fine green shoots of shallot growth poking out of the frozen ground. On the other hand, Peter-from-two plots-up found that he’d had a whole tray of apples and a bag of shallots nibbled by rodents, so at least our shallots are still whole, and still in their bag, rather than inside a rat!

Speaking of wildlife, as we were heading for the gate we saw a large dog fox mooching around an apple tree on a plot, obviously finding rotten windfalls that were tastier than anything else around. What made it remarkable was that less than three yards away was the plot owner, digging in some manure! She said that the fox often came to within a couple of feet of her and she thought it was because she works shifts and is sometimes the only person on the site early in the morning or late in the evening, so he’d got used to her presence. I wish I’d had my camera handy.

Labels: allotment-parsnips, allotment-purple-sprouting-broccoli, allotment-rodents, allotment-shallots, allotment-wildlife