Sunny Spell

All good things come to an end. And so it is with the welcome spell of hot weather we’ve enjoyed recently. The last few weeks really have worked wonders on the soil and seedlings on our plot.

By the beginning of April we really hadn’t done much and the plot was looking rather barren. The sunny weather woke us up to the tasks at hand and they are now well underway. Since we’ve started the enthusiasm for it all has returned.

Now that the weather is cooling down once more we are hoping for a few, well spaced downpours to save ourselves a job and keep the water tank topped up in preparation for the months ahead.

Fancy Mice

The sweetcorn and peas that we have sown in trays in our coldframe seem to be doing very well. No doubt this is due to the lovely sunny weather we’ve had recently but we’ve also made some changes to the coldframe to boost our chances of success.

Visitors to the coldframe last year fell into three categories. Ourselves, slugs and rodents. We were the only ones who didn’t try to eat our seeds and seedlings. The slug problem seems to have been solved by putting a thick layer of gritsand on the floor of the coldframe – the slugs just don’t like crawling through it or over it.

The rodent problem only affected the peas and sweetcorn last year so we have fashioned some clear plastic covers for those seed trays which have, so far, proved to difficult to breach.

So far, so good.

Green City

The onions and garlic that we planted last year are coming on really well. It seems that the usual pests have no interest in them and as a result they have thrived. We planted around 50 white onions, 50 red onions and 30 garlic cloves.

About a month ago we planted another mix of 150 onions and more garlic, including some of the elephant variety which we haven’t grown before.

When stored properly onions and garlic can remain useable for months so we shouldn’t need to put these items on our shopping list for the foreseeable future.