Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb...

It has been a long time since I posted anything here and I have been shamed by the literary industry (and quality) of my fellow allotmenteer and work colleague Mark's gardening blog. It's high time I recorded progress here.

The spring has been busy even though late. Al and I have found plenty to do and at this point we have only some leeks to plant out into what is the only significant space left on the plot. I don't think we have approached the variety of planting that we have managed this spring in the previous two years and like Mark I'll post a diagram of how the plot looks when I have one.

Some of our work has been aimed at getting a crop in future years. The raspberries and strawberries, mentioned in an earlier blog post, are in that category and some things are experimental; Romanescu cauliflower (or broccoli, the books aren't sure), celery, pointed variety cabbage and cucumber fall into that category. I will see how we get on but if I have some losses I won't be too disappointed. In fact some of the brassicas have been attacked by pigeons and slugs already. Netting and the less nasty kind of slug pellet will deal with that problem I hope.

The usual suspects have been planted as well. We have sweetcorn (Lark), squash (Honey Bear, Sweet Dumpling), courgettes (Romanescu and Tuscany) and I sowed beetroot, chard, ,lettuce,  spring onion, parsnip and carrot too. These suffered from cat trouble and I am not sure what will result in the end. We'll find out. 

The plot as it looks at the beginning of June.

We have one crop so far this spring. I planted rhubarb in the first year and it now looks quite vigourous. I took around ten stems and set about making some jam. I had never made it before but the process seemed straightforward and a decent result was obtained (Al acted as a fairly independent judge). My only concern was in dealing with a super heated sugar and fruit mixture - it looked like something that could have been poured from the walls of a castle as a kind of weapon. It tasted better and we now how just less than four pounds of it.

Winter into spring

The winter showed signs of being over this weekend and so Al and I set about getting our first and second early potatoes into the ground. I had turned over the ground that they were to go into last autumn and the snow, ice and rain had done a decent job of breaking down the large clods of earth into a reasonably fine soil. This made the job of making five shallow trenches for 10 tubers each relatively easy.

We put in Kestrel as our second early and Casablanca as the first early. I wanted Lady Christl in place of the latter but there were none left when I placed the order at the beginning of March. I am not expecting too much from them. The ground is stony, and worse, the seed company sent me twice the order in compensation for running out of my first choice. My guess is that if they were prepared to do that, they may not be a first rate potato.

Our morning down on the plot was rather lovely. The weather was mild, the sun was out and we finished work in good time to go out for lunch somewhere nice. Of course, the winter had been dreadful, as it had been for everyone else, and this made a nice day seem even nicer.

We did have the occasional reasonable day in March and we had been able to put in 12 canes of raspberry Glen Ample (albeit in a gentle snow shower), in early March and 10 runners of strawberry Cambridge Favourite at the end of the month. In addition to that we managed to put in onions and shallots a couple of weeks ago. We bought sets of Red Cross, Autumn Gold and Jermor to join the garlic (Bella Italia, Provence Wight) and over-wintered onions (Troy, Red Cross) and shallots (Biztro and Grise). The latter look OK but the onions look a little sorry for themselves - they have had a hard time of course.