Time to Grow

Life on the plot is in full swing now. Excellent climatic conditions have worked wonders on nearly everything that we’ve planted.

The slugs are retreating and we hope to be munching the first strawberries of the year in the next couple of weeks.

Not long after that the onions and garlic will be ready too. There are currently some giant red and white onions breaking the surface of the soil on our plot and the stems on the garlic plants are just starting to yellow.

Too Much

We planted out our courgette plants yesterday. We opted to plant the most promising three plants. That’s probably two too many, but considering that we planted ten last year we really have cut back dramatically.

Looking back on it ten courgette plants was far too much. Once they got going we could hardly pick them fast enough and anyone who knew us quickly became tired of the free courgette deliveries.

This year it will all be different though. Chances are we’ll still end up with too many but we’ve also gathered far more courgette recipes to counter them with.

My Favourite Waste of Time

We’ve pulled up all our radishes and put them all straight on the compost heap.

They just didn’t work this year. Last year was great. The difference, we think (guess), is that we left them in the seed tray for too long before planting them out.

Or maybe we planted them out too early. It took weeks for them to do anything much and then all of a sudden they exploded into life so quickly that they missed the ideal harvesting stage and bolted.

We agreed that we’re not too bothered by this total failure – we’re not that keen on radishes and we now have space to plant something else.

Curious Corn

But there is also some good news. Our thirty-six sweetcorn plants are coming on nicely in the coldframe. They are still a bit delicate to plant out but given another week or ten days and we think they’ll be ready.

Our sweetcorn grew really well last year and produced three large cobs per plant. For some reason the local badgers ate corn on other plots but not ours. Hopefully we can strike the same deal with them this year.