Rain Rain Go Away

It's been rather wet hasn't it?  This has halted play a little with me only managing to plant some beetroot seeds and a row of atomic red carrots.

Things are starting to show though.  The tattys keep breaking the surface, and I keep throwing soil over the top of them.  This serves two purposes, it keeps them from any frost we may get hit by but also allows for the better growth of the tubers.  Stops them from going green too.
The peas have also began to break through too.  This has excited me no end, and I am hoping that the wet weather has meant that the mice stay in their nice centrally heated homes rather than create havoc on our allotment by scoffing my peas.!  Well the though is nice isn't it!

Well this weekend I am off to The Bushcraft Magazine May Meet.  This is the fourth year is has run, and it gets better and better each year.  I just hope that the rain holds off as I shall be in a tent Friday to Monday.

If you are interested in Bushcraft at all I cannot recommend the magazine and the May meet enough.  Check it all out at www.bushcraft-magazine.co.uk

Its been a few weeks since the last update, but we have been pretty busy at the plot.

All the area's we had previously dug over were beginning to come alive with weeds again. The brief sprinklings of rain that we have had allowed the weeds to spring their heads above the surface. It was time to dig again.
We had removed buckets upon buckets of couch grass rhizomes (or noodles as Philly likes to call them) when turning the soil for the first time. It's amazing though how much we had missed, and I thought that we had been pretty careful in removing it all, but on the second dig over we removed quite a lot more.

The dock, dandelions, chickweed, couch grass and red dead nettles were also creeping around our fruit patch, and that is where Phillipa has spent a lot of her time painfully removing all these terrors.

I think you will agree that its really beginning to look a lot better. The front of the picture is how the rest of the patch looked.

We had been predicted an over night frost, so I earthed up the tattys that were beginning to poke their leaves though the soil.

I have also planted the red and white onions. I would estimate that about 120 have gone into the ground and about 20 cloves of garlic.

Next 1 row of carrots and 2 rows of parsnips went into the ground. I would have done more, but ran out of seeds. We are waiting on a delivery of seeds from an offer in one of the national news papers, but it was weeks ago that we sent off for them and since then we have both forgotten what we ordered!

I managed to pick up some builders mesh and poles for a pound at a boot fair, thinking that this would be excellent for peas to grow up. Three different varieties of peas and one variety of mange tout were planted. I forget what the varieties were, but will post up next time.

I had a quick trip after work to make sure that the plot was undisturbed. I have heard that mice like to eat peas, but I think that it is as they are germinating that they are at their most vulnerable so I may have been a little early looking for signs of mice (planted them yesterday).

I was told an old rhyme for planting peas.

One for the rook

One for the crow

One to rot

And one to grow

But from what I have read you should replace both the rook and the crow by mice!

We have also had our first crops from the plot. The first being rhubarb. This was enjoyed by all three of us. Fenn had his cooked down with some pear and loved it. We had ours in a rhubarb clafoutis, and that too was wonderful.

The next harvest, which caused some upturned noses when I announced that what I had picked in my bucket was to be eaten, was a big bunch of nettle tops, red dead nettles and chickweed. These were made into vegetable samosa's, and again were very tasty.