The Beauty of Nature

Today I planted the late potatoes in my new patch of allotment. I had to wait for this area to be cleared of overgrowth and can now see that it is in need of some TLC and nutrients.

However, not enough time to do too much as I wanted to get the potatoes in.

These potatoes have been chitted in the light for a few weeks and have good buds ready to grow. I placed them bud up as you can see.

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Once I placed them in the soil at a good even distance apart (45cm), I then covered them with some nutrients. I’m sure all you beer drinkers out there are jealous of my ‘compost’. And yes, it did smell of beer.

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I then covered the potatoes with soil. You will notice that I didn’t build up the soil too much yet. You only do that as the shoots begin to appear, this forces the potatoes to reach for the sky and gives you a better yield.

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Today I planted some summer cabbage.

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Once I had planted them I netted them to make sure that the birds wouldn’t get them. I also put down some slug pellets to keep away our slimy friends who would like nothing better than to munch away on the tender leaves.

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Having been back to check on them, they are doing fine, though a good day of rain would be nice to save me having to water them

Here you can see that we just placed the cut up spinach in the composter. There is no need to do much more to it, it’s fine as it is.

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In this weather, it will break down quickly. Though I am hoping for a bit of rain soon.

Here we cut up the spinach root we dug up.

The important thing about composting roots is that you cut them up into smaller pieces. This aids the breakdown process and we will soon have some lovely rich compost to bed some more plants with.

Nature is so good to reuse itself and so perpetuate the life-cycle. If only humans were the same.

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Today we dug out some of last years spinach. It has over wintered surprisingly well and we were able to get a few salad leaves from the plant we dug out.

There are still a few plants left, but we will have to have these out soon as we have set some spinach seeds for the new crop.

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You can see that it takes a lot of effort to dig it out as the root is quite thick for something that gives such delicate leaves.

Today we planted some onion sets.

Don’t forget to nip the tops off to stop the birds thinking they are worms and pulling them out.

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Today I checked how the parsnips were doing. They seem to have grown a little and are doing well.

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I also point out how you can tell the difference between a weed and your seedling as it comes up.

We decided to check the Dahlias we had over-wintered in the cold frame to make sure they were good to plant out later on.

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Unfortunately we found that a leatherjacket grub had also over-wintered with the Dahlias and had been feeding on it.

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It was nice and juicy fat when we found it, but didn’t last long – if you know what I mean 😉

Just thought you would like to see how the courgette and cucumber were doing.

This is a week ago, so they are even larger now and have been re-potted into larger pots.

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Today we planted out some broad beans. As it was a little windy we staked them in as they had put on quite a spurt in the greenhouse.

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When we planted them, we added some manure to the hole to provide a little extra nutrient for them.

We are using some cut up tights to hold them to the stake. Remember to tie the support to the stake first and then to the plant so that you don’t damage the stem. Leave enough room for growth as well.