Spring Beauty - Claytonia perfoliata

 

Also known as Miners' Lettuce this green is having its spring flush just now.  It is an introduced plant that has escaped into the British countryside.  I have grown it as a vegetable crop on my allotment for a couple of years now. Here I am sure it has not been sprayed with herbicide.  It looks rather straggly throughout winter, as below, but then it takes off in advance of everything else. Stalks, leaves and flowers (probably root too) are edible. To my surprise it is still mild in flavour after flowering, bot raw and cooked like spinach or lettuce. High in vitamin C it is said to have been used to combat scurvy.

It is worth growing an overwintered row. Like any overwintered crop it is also worth making next year's sowing plan before sowing!

It's All Kicking Off

Now we are into April we are hitting the sweetspot for sowing just about everything.  Already in March the broadbeans and first early potatoes have been planted out.

The broadbeans were looking strong before and after planting out.

The potato variety is Epicure. We like floury potatoes and these fit the bill.  Also they are about the hardiest potato variety known to me and will shrug off any frost damage. (Famous last words)

 

Parsimonious with Parsnips

 

Parsnips are one of the first seeds you can sow direct out of doors.  They are notoriously slow to germinate and also slow to reach maturity. The slow germination means that by the time you notice they have failed it is too late to sow again - unless you are monitoring them very closely and keeping the weeds from overtaking them.  One suggested solution is to sow radishes and parsnips together.  In theory the quick growing radishes mark out the row and are harvested well in advance of the parsnips which then grow on without competition.  I have not tried this as radishes are brutes and their harvesting would necessarily disturb the parsnip roots in the process.  Another strategy, which I have tried, is to sow groups of three parsnips at regular spacings along the row.  This has the advantage of providing an expected pattern to look out for amidst the germinating weeds.  The only problem is when none out of three germinate.  

A renown feature of parsnip seed is its short viability. Many old hands advise that you need to buy new seed each year.   Seed suppliers are generous with the quantity  (800 in the packet above).  20 well grown parsnips is more than enough for me. It is a good idea to share your parsnip seed with your neighbours.

These considerations explain my interest in the "fluid sowing" method suggested by David Gray  in Know & Grow Vegetables (1979).  The idea is that you pregerminate your parsnip seeds before adding them to wallpaper paste which is piped into drills.  (Given that commercial wallpaper pastes all have fungicide in them I use cornflour paste).  In theory, using this method, you know that your seeds are viable and have germinated.  You can also sow accurately to a desired density (by spreading the paste with the given number of seeds along a given length of drill).  

Today I have wetted the seeds. By next weekend I hope they will be ready for deployment outdoors.

footnote: I did try this system two years ago but the whole project failed when a well meaning neighbour deposited a barrel on the bed which repeatedly rolled back and forth across the bed during a windy weather before I discovered it. Last year I sowed conventionally, three times, and still failed to produce parsnips bigger than carrots.  

Picking Up At The Plot

 I have been indulging my newfound interest in flowering plants and particularly wildflowers recently. Despite appearances I have been keeping up with the production of edibles too.  To bring the record up to date, here is a statement of the current state of play.

I went for alliums in a bigger way this year growing autumn and spring planted garlic as well as shallots and onions from seed. These were sown indoors in February .  The garlic has emerged and shallot and onion have been planted out on site yesterday and today. 

Broad beans sown in cells and planted out a month ago are now sitting pretty at the plot. 

Peas on the other hand have refused to be cajoled into germinating early. As a last resort I have started them sprouting in a jam jar in the kitchen and only "sown" them in cells after germination and exporting them to the greenhouse and then the plot.

Still on legumes I have sown 5 varieties of Dwarf French Bean into deep cells in the hope that the improved night temperatures will help them get started.

The greenhouse has been stuffed full each night with the paraffin heater lit on any night when the threat of frost is flagged up by the weatherman.  The main beneficiaries are flowers: Cosmos, Marigold, Lobelia, but also tomato, cucumber and pepper 

Tomatoes and Cucumber

Pepper Hungarian Hot Wax

I have attempted direct sowing at the allotment but tend to hedge my bets by using up remnant seed supplies (open packets from last year or out of date ones).  This way I don't get upset when they fail - although failure is also more likely as a result!  Parsnip, carrot, Swish chard have been experimented with in this way - and have all been resown recently..

Good Friday is a traditional potato planting day.  Easter Saturday and Sunday saw me getting all but the maincrop Rooster in. 

Potatoes in waiting

The patch allocated to potatoes in my rotational plan still had "spring" cabbages at one end and leeks at the other.  Now that's what I call bad planning! The leeks are going into the cookpot.

The ground for runner beans, celery and celeriac has been thoroughly prepped with plenty of buried organic matter.  The celery and celeriac have been growing on at home

Celery and Celeriac  - Can you tell which is which?

 but the runner beans have yet to be sown.  The courgettes squashes and sweetcorn haven't been sown either yet, but I have recently prepared a bed for them too.  My method is to bag all my weeds and trimmings in old black lined compost bags and leave them for a year or two to rot down in the hope that after another year buried underground any weed seeds will not be viable.  This keeps all the nutrients recycled on the site - all except the edible part of any crops.  

Weed suppression is something I take very seriously.  The best method is to have a crop growing but failing that deployment of weed suppressant fabric in the early part of the growing season saves hours of repetitive weeding.  As the sowing season progresses so the aesthetically unpleasing fabric gets rolled back. 

Brassicas tend to be at their best late in the growing year. None more so than purple sprouting broccoli which is currently in full production mode. 

 One again my lack of planning means the row of PSB plants is right in the middle of this year's carrot patch (under the fine mesh).  The PSB needs nets to keep the pigeons off while the carrots need fine netting to keep the carrot root fly off. so it is a bit of a logistic nightmare to cater for them both simultaneously.  As the early carrot sowing show no sign of germination yet perhaps there is no imminent prospect of running out of space just yet - the main crop carrots can wait until the PSB harvesting season is over.

This years brassicas and leeks are coming on at home in readiness for planting out. It iis going to be busy for the next month or two!

Early season brassicas

Leeks

 

New Year Cheer

 January flowers are such a rare thing. Thank goodness for the witch hazel

Winter Flowering Cherry

and Winter Jasmine

The bulbs are sprouting green leaves but not even the snowdrop will manage to put in an appearance before January is out.

And on the subject of bulbs I have this week planted 3 rows of garlic at the allotment (to add to the autumn sown ones).  Back indoors I have sown 32 broad beans into deep root trainers.  These will go into the greenhouse once they emerge and on to the allotment in due course.  Yes spring is just around the corner.  Next week will be busy now that I have looked out my seeds for early sowing! (Leeks, onions, shallots, tomatoes and chilli, as well as lobelia .

Let's Get On With The Show

 

Looking at my recent posts you wouldn't think I was interested in gardening.  To dispel that, here is the current state of play.  As you can see these are outdoors during the daytime at least. Others have progressed from indoors to the protection of the greenhouse, newly vacated by hardier plants

Some other greenhouse crops are still in the dark on lower shelves of the greenhouse.  Once they sprout they will be turfed outside too.

I had not reckoned on the protracted period of cold nights when I started sowing, but so far there have been no frost victims

And in case you are wondering I decided to have a go at growing onions and shallots from seed as well as the usual leeks.  Early brassicas and some flowers (e,g, lobelia, marigolds and rudbeckia) also feature. After a long stint in the home nursery thank goodness I can soon move them on to the open garden, school and allotment. 

In Cold Storage

After my protracted excursion into the wild you might think I have given up raising vegetables.  Fear not.  I did get carried away with the warm patch at the end of February and sowed lots of things.  Then of course the weather turned cold.  Today for instance the thermometer has peaked at a balmy 7C as the sun has made an appearance.  The night time temperatures have hovered perilously close to  freezing.  I have the paraffin heater at the ready because the greenhouse is bursting at the seams.  Under the circumstances the production line from propagator to indoor lights to greenhouse to outdoors, has well and truly come to a grinding, if temporary, halt.  I've taken a snapshot of the situation with the benefit of the aforementioned sunny interval:

Propagator

Indoor lights

Greenhouse Right

Greenhouse Left

Greenhouse centre

Hardy outdoors

Shed

I do have two rows of early potatoes already planted at the plot

But the rest are waiting for the Good Friday day of planting.

It has been a nervous week of watching the temperature forecasts and I am so looking forward to a change in the wind direction and a jump in the temperature so that I can get the production line going again.  After all it is April and according to the seed packets it is the ideal time to sow just about ANYTHING you may care to grow.

As I write the sun has disappeared and a shower of hailstones is pelting down.

Fantastic Plastic

Everything in moderation.  A frequently cited aphorism before the sex and drugs and rock and roll generation threw out the rule book.  Well now we are learning that it is true for plastic too.  Plastic does wonderful things in the garden: hose pipes, water butts, netting, rodent resistant compost bins!  But the one thing it doesn't do is biodegrade.  So as Obi Wan Kenobe says - "Use it wisely".

Another saw trotted out by old gardening hands is "Label Everything".  It is a maxim I have fallen fowl of many times.  In the first instance you need to know you have planted or sown something in a particular space.  Who has not ever oversown a row - maybe of slow germinating parsnips or parsley or even, as I once did,  dormant Jerusalem artichokes?  Secondly you need to know which particular something that is.  Sometimes I have not got around to labelling a sowing straight away and then cannot recall which was early cauliflower and which late purple sprouting broccoli.  Now I always write out the label before setting out to sow. I always include the date too.  Why bother being so specific?  If you don't know the variety and the date sown your chances of replicating a success or avoiding a failure are minimal.  A garden label at harvest time is a message of encouragement from your younger less knowledgeable self.  Hey old chap you thought these carrots were Flakkee  sown in April but I just thought you would like to know that they were James Scarlet Intermediate sown on 18th May!  Aside from direct sowings seed trays and modules offer other challenges.  One label one seed tray, but what about transplanting.  Who gets the label or how many more do you need?  And do you label every module in a 60 cell flat?  (The answer here is to choose your size of tray or flat to ensure you have a monoculture.  Once you have more than one labelling becomes a problem.) You could try labelling a row at a time in a mixed modular tray but I now make it a rule when potting on to make a new label for every pot.  The result is that I need a lot of labels.  I bought a supply of 150 a couple of weeks ago thinking that would let me off cleaning up some old ones.  They are fast running out already so a clean up operation is imminent.

Plastic Coated Plastic Labels

Which brings us back to plastic.  Wood is good, graphite is great, but if you can't read your pencil scribed lollipop stick label after six month in the dirt come rain or shine or hail or snow you may as well not have bothered.  The green garden retailers have attempted to come up with a more ecologically sound system than white plastic labels and a black marker for addressing this issue but, to date, no viable alternative has passed the consumer test.   The downside to that indelible "laundry marker" pen is its strength. Its etchings are not water soluble. Nor do they seem to be shifted by white spirit turpentine or surgical spirit.  I know I have tried with the aid of a cloth, wire wool or an old toothbrush.  In the process I've managed inhale noxious fumes, to flick these agents into my eyes, ruin clothes and melt plastic gloves but never successfully restored a plastic label to it's pristine, just off the production line, state.  The solution to the problem of transforming single use plastic labels into lifelong use turns out to be the application of a small amount more plastic.  I cover the white plastic label with a layer of smart/invisible/magic  "writeable" tape, up one side then wrapped over the top,  and then write on the tape with the indelible marker.  It is not perfect, not organic, but it works: You know what you have grown and when it was sown and you have reduced the waste involved to the minimum. a two inch length of tape.  The plastic label itself stays pristine and is reused year after year in this way.

And don't forget the date!

Up and Away

Vegetable garden blogging is a contradictory activity:  Either you have nothing to report and all the time in the world to blog, or you are so active that you don't have the time or the energy to blog.  Recently I have moved from one phase to the other.  Aside from the improvement in the weather dictating a change of gear I have also been helping out in a school vegetable garden lately so demands on my vegetable growing time have doubled.  Having made my excuses here is an update.  Pride of place goes to the migration of the sensitive plants to the greenhouse where they are resident 24 hours.

Tomatoes

Courgettes and Butternut Squash

Chilli Peppers

Outside the greenhouse the former occupants are disporting themselves across the "patio" area.

Spot the bench to relax on.

Indoors the sowing programme continues with the second round of brassica sowings.  Nowadays I am much more disciplined about labelling everything at the time of sowing:

This year, after sowing, I log everything on a spreadsheet.  I realised today that I have now made my 100th sowing of the year.  (That is home sowing:  school sowings have their own log.)

Onwards and Upwards:

Here Comes The Sun

I suspended any idea of sowing in mid February.  Even though seeds are started off indoors and stay indoors for a week or two I still find it impossible to sow when it is blowing a snowstorm outside. It takes a bit of sun put you in the mood.  Today the sun appeared again and I celebrated by sowing some broad beans and some peas.

Now You See Them...

I have decided to plant out my broad beans, even though the onset of winter is nigh. Planted in cells on 24 October the intention was to plant them out in spring.  But they prospered in the cold greenhouse and developed roots which were bursting out of their cells. Following the guide that plants shout be transplanted once the roots appear through the holes at the bottom I accepted that they were too far advanced to be kept in their cells.  Fortunately I have been experimenting with a fleece tunnel at the plot and so have constructed a sheltered home for them:

Broad beans planted out

Now You Don't!

and covered

More In Hope Than Expectation

It's that time of year when you are fed up waiting for spring.  On Thursday I looked out anything from my seed collection that could possibly be sown in February and filled twelve small pots - as many as I could fit in two seed trays which themselves fit snugly in my propagator. Just a sprinkling of seed in each - let's see what happens! Said propagator is tucked out of the way in the coal cellar which has a power supply and a grow light ready for when the first sprouts appear.

Don't forget those labels

That was Thursday, on Friday the view of the Pentland Hills (just south of Edinburgh) suggested that I might have got a bit carried away:

The Pentland Hills

 My impatience seems to be shared judging by other gardening blogs.


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