Long beet and celery time

Here is a photo of the celery from Medwyns polytunnel a couple of weeks ago. They weren't huge specimens but what struck you was how clean the foliage was by being grown indoors. With this in mind I intend to construct an enviromesh frame over my plants this season as I have sufered from celery rust the past couple of years quite late in the season. Once it gets hold it overtakes the plants very quickly and promising looking specimens were soon rendered useless for showing.

It has touched 24deg C today so I took the opportunity to get my celery plants outside to harden off in readiness for planting out next week sometime.

I'm having a go at long beet this season and after some delay all the seedlings have now popped through. I'm growing them in long tubes set on top of some drums of finely sieved homemade compost, which in turn is set on a metal frame filled with finely sieved topsoil, giving me a total depth of about 5 foot. I only have 8 pipes but I only really need a set of two for the RHS Westminster Show in October.

High ambition to be growing a crop for the first time for such a prestigious event but I am ambitious if not stupid. The pipes are filled to a couple of inches below the rim so that I can top up as the shoulders swell. This way they won't become exposed and get corky.

The raised wooden bed behind the tubes has my pickling shallots in. I stand on a raised duck board to tend them so saving strain on the smithyveg backbone. I have also made myself a 30mm metal gauge at work and will be taking bulblets off the main clumps as and when they reach NVS pickling shallot size.