Now that it has grown a bit more it is obvious that the two plants i have labled as mum’s pumpkins are actually courgettes now the seeds from mum came out of a pumpkin in my presence so I can only assume I managed to mix up seedlings at some point and perhaps one of the courgettes will turn out to be a pumpkin who knows. It does mean we should have courgettes a bit earlier than I expected, I know many people have them already but we were late planting out most of the plants.

Otherwise  I have been hacking things up in the greenhouse!  Don’t worry not the plants, I have chopped the staging in half as I was not using it all and I planted too many cucumbers for the space available. So now i have four foot of staging not eight and the second half will make a shelf underneath when I have an extra pair of hands to hold it in place while I attach it to things. The cucumbers and gerkins now have a much more sensible amount of space and my moneymaker tomato is no longer about to disappear beneath them. I planted two types of cucumber rather mixed up and was worried I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart but even now when they are tiny they are easy to tell apart Telegraph Improved is long and green and White Wonder are a pale yellowy white which stands to reason really considering the name!

Small’s pumpkin is growing well and has been joined by several others on the plant, if this keeps up we may want to remove some of them as I think he would like to grow a really big one.

Apart from that all I’ve really done is hack down a few more weeds, started to try and sort some netting for the runner beans, found I didn’t have enough with me so it’s part done and dug half the row of Formost as the leaves are now looking very past it. The potatoes themselves look very good however, I got 4lb 8oz and couldn’t spot a single slug hole.

Potatoes this year have so far been very good and early this year cetainly for me and others around here. One of my neightbours who planted some main crops in a well manured bed is already digging them with very good results, his plants look spectacular.

No photos this post as the camera has gone away for the weekend with Tom and Noodles.Well apart from this one of lady Christl potatoes I took back along. We dug 6lb 2 oz in total of her.

Lady Christl

Just been pottering as it is really very hot and I don’t want small ones getting sunstroke or indeed getting it myself.

Things are growing and indeed getting eaten.. something has nibbled off the stalks on the runner beans i suspect a rabbit so I may try putting up some netting and see if they recover. Also the peas are coming up through the chicken wire cages now so some net to protect them from similar damage may be a plan.

nibbled off beans

Various pumpkin and squashes are starting to develop, again I wait to see if they get eaten or not. The first one spotted did get nibbled off but since then we have a much bigger one developing on the small ones pumpkin plant which was the first planted out and by far the most developed. His is a variety called big max which we got in Lidl. The other showing baby fruit is from seeds got from my mother from a pumpkin she grew from seeds my aunt gave her. It was quite large but tasty.

Big max pumpkin

Keeping my fingers crossed nothing eats this as it is on the small ones plant..

Big Max flower

Interestingly, well to me anyway, while they both should be big round orange pumpkins in the end the Big Max start off yellow and round but Mum’s ones are elongated and green more like a marrow in look.

Pumpkin from mum's seeds, smaller flower has a proto pumpkin.

The salad blue potatoes have very pretty extremely lightly blue tinted flowers, they look whiter in the picture than they are, with lilac decoration.

Salad Blue

Cara on the other hand have bunches of pure white flowers held high on stalks.

Cara

We also dug the Lady Christl up yesterday and got a good crop i will post up the exact amounts and a photo later but certainly each plant cropped more than the Red Duke of York and while there was a few that had some slug damage it was fairly minor, certianly less than the swift. They also taste good again much better than Swift. We grew 5 plants of this and 9 of Red Duke of York.

Having dug two full rows of potatoes and having another one of earlies to dug soon I have filled the space with some winter squash (3) and courgettes (4) that have been knocking about in pots till now so we will see how they do.

We have quite a few different potato flowers and one in particular I though was really pretty. I think these are Cartriona but I will have to double check.

striped flower

Also just to continue the whole, nothing like the rest of them theme of my mystery different Mayan Twiglight (Twilight) This is what the rest look like.

Mayan Twiglight - the rest of them

close up to show depth of colour

And this is the other one.

Mayan Twiglight - the other one.

So says the Met Office and it is certainly on the warm side today. It was pretty warm yesterday as well but we also had one of those extremely heavy summer storms where you get soaked to the skin in ten seconds flat and the roads flood till the drains manage to catch up with the amount of water falling out of the sky!

I did get some stuff done on the plot Sunday morning though and a little after the smalls were in bed so not a bad weekend. The lane side of the hedge is now trimmed, not as tightly as some enough not to be in the way. I am keeping my fingers crossed for a good blackberry crop as there are certainly plenty of flowers currently and definitely more than one type of bramble.

Did some hacking of overgrown areas in the middle of the plot so it looks a bit tidier, there is plenty of sorting to be done over winter to get the plot more up straight for next season including clearing that middle strip which is very uneven due in part to random piles of soil. We also plan to clear a bigger area than currently planted for fruit bushes and build a proper fruit cage.

Greenhouse end of June

The greenhouse is growing well and I am seriously considering cutting down the staging on the right hand side to give the cucumbers more room! The plant in a compost bag on the path is an aubergine that I bought as I didn’t get round to growing any from seed.

We have baby tomatoes and gerkins coming though as yet i haven’t spotted a baby cucumber though there are flowers.

Baby tomatoes

Baby gerkin

Outside we have the beginnings or pumpkins on Noodles Big Max Pumpkin so keep fingers crossed the slugs don’t eat them or the rabbits!  There is also at least one patty pan developing.

Big Max pumpkin, the flower was huge before the slugs got to it.

Patty Pan, love the shape

We have dug the rest of the red Duke of York, 7lb 3 oz in total and no slug damage or anything. Tey are great potatoes and definetly on the regrow list. I think we will dig the rest of the first earlies soon as they are starting to look a little sad and that would mean a nice area to plant more stuff out into which has minimal weeds to deal with first !

Earlies being dug, mains mostly flowering now.

The lettuce in the salad bed has bolted rather as has the rocket and had some huge slugs hiding among the leaves, The brocalli rab, turnips, beet greens and beetroot are growing well though my second sowing of radishes are begin slug attacked. It may be time to look at slug control options.

bolting lettuce

brocalli rab

Saturday was spent doing one allotment stuff and Sunday we got to the site to find that there had been qute a lot of damage and break ins, a fact of life I suppose allotments are an easy target as there is no-one living there, at least ours doesn’t tend to get the vegs nicked as some which back on to houses do.

We try and work on the principle of keeping nothing worth nicking on the plot but that doens’t stop people doing damage to check, in some ways I’m quite glad we don’t have a gate and so forth as there is less damage to do to get into our plot, we went past one that had been kicked off it’s hinges.

Swift harvest

We did dig some more potatoes for tea. I dig up all the Swift, five plants in total, as the leaves were looking very eaten unlike the rest of the plants around them. Got some very decent sized potatoes though only a few per plant, one was plenty big enough to bake. In total we got 5lb 4.5 oz not counting the one too slug damaged to use. There was a few bits of slug damage on some others but nothing major.

Boiled they were nice, held together well and had a very delicate flavour. I prefered the Red Duke of York favour wise but there is enough to try them a different way and see how they go.

Some digging was done, though small people arn’t heavy enough to get the spade in the ground on their own!

Shouldn't it go into the ground??

Finally some earth to move !

Some older help is called for

So does planting them make them grow more?

Things are moving slowly along. The weather has been changeable but the plants seem to like it.

As you can see the greenhouse plants are growing well, in fact in the couple of days since that photo was taken the bigger cucumbers are now above the window level. You can also see the bamboo blinds which are helping a huge amount, they just cut down the light and heat enough so things aren’t actively scorching any more.

The potatoes are filling out well too and very much need earthing up. We picked up another load of compost in the trainer so that will need to be done this week when we can. The Red Duke of York were very nice boiled and have got to be a contender to be rown again next year.

Hedge - you can see the mulch better than the actual plants

Over the weekend we got given a bunch of hedging someone was grubbing out. It’s completely the wrong time to move such plants but we put them in anyway and will see if they survive. Being hawthorn they are pretty rugged so we can hope and even if only some survive we can then fill in the gaps with other things. It changes the feel of that part of the plot significantly and I now want to get the slabs moved into the box pallet or down the plot to make paths so we can level that part out between the shed and the crabapple and do something with it. Probably mainly planting perminat things like articokes. I want to grow something up the shed but haven’t decided what as yet.

Poles for a sun sail

We have also put some poles in to hang a sun sail from, ie a fabric shade and have started on the final incarnation (for now anyway) of the pallet fence. Tom is finally happy with how it is going together.

The fruit bushes are getting close to cropping now and we are considering making the whole of that area one big fruit cage but that will be a winter job clearing and building the frame.

Last but certainly not least today i finally managed to start clearing the bed on the other side of the path from the potatoes. We had cleared enough for two rows of potatos and a pumpkin but then needed to do other things and I’ve had lots of plants desperate to go in the ground. The ground is lovely to dig currently after the rain we have had so I managed to do about a metre and a half before it got to hot and dig some space the other side of the path to put the comfphery plants in to.

Sweetcorn intercropped with pumpkins.

In this space I have put sweetcorn and pumpkins. To be precise 10 minipot sweetcorn and four others that are meant to be full sized cobs. The pumpkin by the potatoes is Big Max then I have intercropped the sweetcorn with two Mum’s pumpkins (ie seeds from a pumpkin she grew last year) and two Chicago Warted Hubard. Finally on the far edge near the path is a butternut squash and a round corgette. Intercropping sweetcorn with squashes of some sort and growing beans up the sweetcorn is a very traditional method of growing them called three sisters so I’m going to plant some beans next to each sweetcorn but forgot to take them down today.

Finally we are starting to get actual food from the allotment all be it small amounts. It is a great thrill however to be able to pick our own food.

two types of lettuce, rocket, beetroot thinnings and mixed radishes

We were away last weekend and it was no loss gardening wise as the baking sun gave way to constant rain. It is finally brightening up again and I hope we can get some work done this weekend but everything has been happy to get some rain including the docks which shot up in the few days we were away. More importantly the peas and beans have all made appearances and the runners in particular are doing their standard speed growing now they are above ground. I hope the wetter ground means clearing the weeds to allow me to plant all the things still sitting in the frame will be easier than the baked earth we did have. Less watering in required as well. Today is sunny which if it holds should dry things out just enough for digging.

I will take the camera down the plot tomorrow and you can see how much the tomatoes and cucumbers have grown in just a few days. Next year I will try and pot them up a few weeks earlier as they were struggling in the small pots they were in. I still have a bunch outside like that and they are looking very stressed, though I’m not sure I really need them on top of the ones i have planted up anyway.

So far apart from the occasional strawberry I have picked a bowl of salad that you can see above and mid week we dug up one plant of Red Duke of York. There were some nice sized potatoes but there were also a good number of tiny pea sized ones so we will leave them a couple more weeks and should have a good number more I hope from each plant.

first Red Duke of York

Yes they really are that brightly coloured too and Noodles can’t wait to try the pink potatoes as he calls them. The skin is very thin and the potato underneath is white so we will see how they cook up tonight.

I also planted a whole bunch of brassicas and leafy plant seeds in modules today so we will see how they go, some are a little late but I think it worth a go anyway.

most of the rows of potatoes

Things move on slowly. The potatoes are growing well, as you can see they are mostly growing on appropriate to when they were planted. Most of them look pretty similar now they are growing apart for Red Duke of York which is much more vigorous and has a certinaly redness to it’s stems etc. the other is Mayan Twiglight ( or Twilight as I’m pretty sure they had mis-spelled the label but I like it).

Mayan Twiglight

All but one of the plants have much more pointed, smaller more tomato looking leaves in quite a light green.

The other one.

The last one is bigger, red stemmed and has big dark rounder green leaves.. much more like Red Duke of York, which is very strange, I would say I must have mixed up the seed potatoes but out of all of them Mayan Twiglight are the most distinctive being red and white splotchy long thin tubers.. we will have to wait till harvest.

Tomatoes, added a couple more since this photo

I finally cleared out the greenhouse.

Most of the tomatoes have been planted up, well those that will fit in the greenhouse. have them in a mix of small IKEA blue bags, one of the IKEA planters, all with holes punched in the bottoms. Also some old compost bags rolled down and part filled. Finally i found a 7 foot long metal gridded trough in the scrap metal pile on site and decided it still had use. I lined it with opened out compost bags, again punctured for drainage, then filled with compost and it now has 8 tomatoes in it. The green bag has cucumbers in and there are various peppers that need potting up in bigger pots.

cucumbers in the green bag.

Tonight Tom hung up some old bamboo blinds as it is so hot in there we can’t keep anything on the staging as it burns so we can at least play with some shading now.

Nearly everything else is either in the harding off frame or behind it in a slightly shaded area as all the pots are drying out faster than I can water them. The frame is full of pumpkins and other squashes, corgettes, spare cucumbers, sweetcorn and so on.

Hardening off frame, a box pallet with fleece

We also have glode artichokes, leeks, kale, strawberies in pots, and finally various brassicas I got cheap at B&Q. I planted some of those around the edge of our eldests pumpkin bed, I will move them again before it takes over but hopefully the larger soil area should help them survive.

British Bank Holidays are well known for being wet but not this one it seems. I always find the May holidays a bit funny and this time it just feels like we have jumped from one to another., due to where Easter was we had four weeks of school, including the first May bank holiday off and now we are at half term! I have never quite got why we have two bank holidays in May. The first is May day but why the second and why not have it in June or July to spread them out more?

Anyway what have we done?

Well I mowed the top part of the plot which helps make it look more kept though I really need to weed the first raised bed then you will be able to see down to the greenhouse before hitting any signifcant weeds or similar. I have left a stripe down the hedge side for wild flowers, partly because it is a ditch and bank and partly for the butterflies and bees.

I planted up the whole of the middle bed, though it isn’t done in this picture but the camara ran out of power and we put out a pumpkin in Noddles bed covered in feece for a few days to get acclimatised.. We did more weeding and earthing up of potatos though there is still more to do and as always plenty to plant. We also planted the last few potatos and put in a path along the edge at the far bottom left courner. We plan to put a bench at the end of that path as it is pretty much the only place on the plot where you can sit in the shade of trees.

Finally we bought some bags at IKEA with the idea of using them as planters so watch this space to see if it works !!.

I have spend a few hours up at the plot this last week dodging the rain, though you can’t see much change compared to many of the jobs we have done in the past. Last Sunday we spent a short while up there before the rain hit but it was long enough for Tom and his dad to chop down the worst of the docks along the lane and allow us to put plastic down to try and keep them from coming back as vigerously.

Otherwise I have mostly been pottering around, moving plants into the hardening off frame, then bringing more from home. I also weeded the two new raised beds and planted out my rather sad looking broad beans but I thought I’d give them a chance as they have sat in pots so long. I need to get some other things into that bed. The other bed was half planted a couple of weeks ago with seeds which are starting to show if you look very carefully.

In that bed, sowed across the bed, so each row is about a metre long, are the following. From right to left looking from the greenhouse.

2 rows Parsnip – Gurnsey from Heritage seed library – rather late but I thought worth a try even if they were only baby ones.

Carrots -Karvnavit (showing), John’s Purple and Chanternay red-cored (showing)

Beetroots – Bolthardy(good showing) , Detroit 2(showing) and Di Chiocchia (one or two just coming up)

with some radish between the last two rows which are already doing well.

I have divided the other end of the bed into 12 (+3 halfs) approx one foot sq areas and planted up some young rocket, Lollo Rossa and Parella Red lettuce I had started in seed trays. I will try and plant other salad and herbs in the rest this weekend.

The potatos continue to grow well. The Pink fir apple are now showing properly and the other that were planted after them are coming through as well.. Everything else is showing well and the Mayan Twilight have an interestingly different leaf compared to the rest, though they seem more variable from plant to plant than most of them. I will try and take close ups of each type once they are growing well to show you the differences