Enough with the wet!

Well, the rain is coming down... and down... and down. I'm pretty sure this is the wettest spring in my memory. I took the risk a couple of weeks ago and sowed some early seed: carrots, radishes, peas, salsify, and beetroot. The peas and radishes are doing well, but I suspect the rest have drowned.

I always figure it's worth the risk though - seed is cheap, so you might as well take a chance of getting some early goodies. And if the weather turns out, well, like this, you can always just re-sow when the soil dries out again.

In the meantime I'm back to the burrow to curl up with a good book!

Parsnip!

Never eat anything bigger than your own head, they say... Challenge accepted. (Average sized parsnip included for comparison.)

These parsnips were planted in early spring. Parsnips can be a bit tricky - they can take a month to germinate (so don't give up on them too soon) and they need to be gently thinned when young to a good spacing for the grown-up plants. Keep them well weeded too, particularly when they're small - they don't cope well with competition.

Apart from that fussing, you'll also need to just leave them alone until winter - and they'll taste even sweeter if they've frosted in the ground once or twice.

Bean looking for Autumn plantings?

Right now my paws are busy planting broad beans for a spring/early summer crop. I've managed to get over baby rabbit trauma with regard to this legume, and I now very much enjoy them picked young, parboiled, and then stir-fried with a little olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Add feta cheese, salami, chorizo, or bacon if you wish - they all go beautifully!

I'll also be getting my garlic in soon. Garlic can go in as cloves anything up to a month or two either side of midwinter, and gets harvested a bit after midsummer.

Winter greens like red mizuna, green mizuna, lettuce, giant red mustard and land cress can still be started from seed inside, and planted out once they're a few inches tall.

The other thing I'm planting from seed now is peas. I won't get a crop off them until spring/early summer, but they'll pop up now and sit through the winter at just a few inches high (they're very frost and snow hardy), and then they take off in spring. The advantage of doing this is that they develop a good root system over winter and get a huge head start on peas planted in spring. This trick works both with edible peas (choose from the podding varieties Alderman Tall, Dwarf Shelling, Prolific Pink Podding, and Dutch Blue, and the mange-tout variety Goliath in my Felt shop) and flowering sweet peas.

Buried treasure

Hey, look what I found in the compost! (I have a tiny, itsy-bitsy problem with secateur retention. Just a little one. There's probably four more pairs around the property somewhere. That's normal, right?)

If I left them for long enough do you think they'd grow into loppers?

Wet Wet Wet

Rained-on chickens always look pretty miserable. Rained-on, moulting chickens? The very definition of pathetic-ness. (I don't think the girls are actually miserable. Chickeny life seems to continue as usual. But damn, do they look it!)

Unexpected dividends

Well the barley that grew from the straw I mulched the sweet corn with has produced - enough for a couple of pots of soup anyway! It doesn't appear to have competed overly much with the corn either - I'd call that a reasonably successful unplanned experiment!

Monsters in the undergrowth

Oops, took my eye off the courgettes for five minutes.

Awesome sauce

A 3.5 kg pick from the Black from Tula toms today. Sauce, methinks.

Winter planning and planting (yes, really!)

Alrighty, winter vege a go-go! (Yes, if you want to grow them from seed now is the time.) I've got a big variety in as you can see, including my own red cabbage, lettuce, green mizuna, red mizuna, rocket, land cress, giant red mustard. Go mad with these and any other brassicas you love, as well as Florence fennel, celery, celeriac, spinach, chard, endives etc.

Happy new year, fellow garden denizens!

I've had a couple of extra tenants on my patch recently. My redcurrant bush has been host to a blackbird nest with two cute wee fledgelings, and it looks like today is going to be a big day for them!

They're out of the nest for the very first time, looking rather apprehensive,  and mum is calling them right now from the peach tree across the way. Good luck little ones!

I'd love to know what influences birds to feed from certain crops or not. The redcurrant bush is currently laden with fruit, and the raspberries next to it are still doing pretty well too, but the birds never seem to go for my berry crops. (Even when they're living there, it seems!) Yet I have several friends who have to net their berries assiduously every year to get even a few for themselves.

I count my blessings in this case, but what gets hammered in my garden instead is peas and lettuces. It's the sparrows that do 'em in, and I must say I don't think it's very neighbourly behaviour (sniff). Unless I net the pea plants from day one the poor things never get a chance to grow - they're just eaten down to nubs. If I net them until they're flowering they survive, but they still get ripped to shreds, reducing their crop significantly.

Oh well. I'm glad it's not the berries, anyway.