So I've done a few other things with the few hours I managed to grab in the garden. I've pricked out a few trays of cabbage (Brigadier), red cabbage (Rodeo) and brussel (Abacus). At the far end the onion sets 'Setton' all have small green shoots.
Also in the greenhouse the shallots are growing strongly but a few are looking a a bit poorly at the leaf tips. A quick squeeze of the main bulb tells me that they are going rotten so I reckon I'll be left with about 25. Still if they all split into 4 it will give me 100 to select my sest from.
Although not time to be planting your spuds outside yet you do need to make sure all is well with them. Mine are set out in trays under a towel to exclude light for now. The shoots are only a few millimetres long and a quick inspection told me all was well and none have rotted off. These ones are Kestrel.
With a view to a local show that is held early in July, and which I entered for the first time last season, I have set away some Casablanca potatoes in buckets. This set up allows me to keep the buckets indoors for now, and once growing away they can be put into the greenhouse during the night. During the day they can be put outside but bought back in at night if frost is forecast. When thefoliage is so big that I cannot easily move the plants all risk of frost should be gone, but I will have to support the foliage.Last season I tied some string around it and secured it to next door's wire fence. Watering was easy and I harvested some clean, if weird shaped potatoes, and managed to win the class with 3 Kestrel. This year I'm just doing these 4 buckets each with a single Casablanca seed that I reduced to a couple of shoots on each. I chose Casablanca as it's an early variety but also because I can't wait to grow it and couldn't wait until an August harvest to find out how it grows.
This diagram shows how I did it.
Also with a view to this early show I set up this framework in the greenhouse to grow some long carrots. The pipes still had some compost in them from last season where i'd tried to grow some long beet outside. The beet hadn't really come to anything, making puny roots that suffered from leaf miners,so I figured the compost still had some of the nutrients in it. I emptied each one out inividually, added about 4 litres of sand from my old stump bed, 4 ounces of superphosphates, 2oz of lime, and 2oz of potash, mixed it all together and refilled each pipe having screwed them to the frame to keep them upright. 4 seeds were sown 1/2" deep in each pipe, dead in the centre. If all goes well they'll grow through the mix and into the greenhouse border soil.
Within a couple of hours i'd filled 8 tubes and got the seed sown. It's 17 weeks to the July show so i'm not sure if these will be of a size i'd want to show but if not I'll leave them for a show in mid-August. If nothing else it will help me learn something about growing carrots in pipes indoors and perhaps give me something to think about for when emptying and refilling several tonnes of sand in drums becomes too much of a chore. Hopefully a few years away yet although I'm no spring chicken anymore!
And I hope you all like the new outfit we bought Oscar yesterday. He wore it whilst we watched the reds stuff Arsenal in the Cup together. I'm very proud.
5 comments:
Simon - what size of pipe have you used in the greenhouse structure?
Oscar looks good in hiz snazzy MU outfit.
Wait a minute............isn't that one of your nappies he's wearing? You really should buy him some of his own.
Helen....6" dia. by about 3'6" long. The border soil gives me another foot or so. They take quite a bit of filling.
Richard....f*** off!
One other thing I should have mentioned.....I'll wrap some silver foil around the black pipes to deflect heat....didn't have time to paint them white.
An urgent DIY job stopped you from being in the garden? Do you mean the the DIY job that you have half done which took about an hour?!!
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