Permission to swear Captain Mainwaring?

In a previous post I mentioned the plastic and mesh covers that I'd made for my long carrot drums. I remarked that they wouldn't win any awards for joinery. Well they won't win any awards for f*cking staying put in high winds either. I got home at lunch time today to find them on their sides in various states of disrepair, having scraped across the top of several carrots in the process. The wind was so bad it took me all my time to temporarily lash them down back in position so time will tell whether more serious damage has been done to my showing ambtions for this season! I really should have fixed them down in the first place. Ho hum.

It was a highly productive weekend otherwise as I got 12 pea plants planted for a show in early July. I mistimed these last season and had them ready the week before so hopefully i'll go one better this time. I also managed to get 15 bags of Kestrel potatoes planted in bags. It really is a case of throwing them together this season, a handful of calcified seaweed and a handful of Tev04 into each bag of unsieved peat and hoping for the best. I also have 15 bags of Casablanca and 10 bags of NVS Sherine with a dozen bags of NVS Amour to follow this weekend.



I spent a good few hours getting my celery planting positions prepared. I've struggled to get enough water to them in the past, and despite drenching the raised beds regularly I reckon most of it just runs away without getting to the roots in sufficient volume. Having noted how my tomatoes grow so well in bottomless pots and seeing how Medwyn grew his for Chelsea I positioned these large bottomless pots into the soil, really screwing them down deep. The soil was then scooped out and sieved free of all lumps and stones, and mixed with dried blood and nutrimate. Before replacing the boosted and sieved soil I put some horse muck in a bucket and filled with water overnight to create a nice wet slurry. A couple of inches of this wet dung was put into the base of the bottomless pots and the soil replaced, the celery being planted into this. Hopefully the bog loving plants will thrive after getting their feet into the horse muck and the pots will allow me to get water straight to the roots of the plants.

I'm growing 12 plants of Evening Star....

....although one of them shows no sign of the purple tingeing, being totally pale and a throwback to one of the parent lines no doubt.

Here is one of the finished beds. Note the sacrificial hostas in the background (I'll still apply a few pellets) and the smaller bottomless pots around the plants to start the 'drawing' process. I won't be collaring until 6-8 weeks before the show date. I will also erect some form of barrier over the plants towards August to keep celery blight off and will be spraying against celery leaf miner which has been a real pest for me in the past.

Elsewhere I got around to getting some strips of black weed suppressant material around the base of my parsnips. I'm told this will help fend off parsnip attack as when the spores on the leaves 'sporelate' (is that a real word Thornton?) they will land on the material rather than the growing medium and hence cannot get at the crown of the root. We shall see. I also won't win any awards for the tidiest looking parsnip drums!