Shrewsbury etc

The kids' xmas present was a weekend break so we took advantage of it this weekend, spending it in Shropshire and the pleasant town of Shrewsbury. Pervy Throwup's Dingle garden looked absolutely fantastic, the rhododendrons in full bloom but I was particularly taken by these rabbits made from sempervivums.

Today we spent a few hours at the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution at Ironbridge. Strong and sturdy and yet with perfectly graceful lines, a thing of pure beauty. The bridge was nice too.

Back at home and i'm quietly satisfied with the way most of my stuff is growing, from these onions in 7" pots for the under 250g class....


















.....to these leeks which will need planting out next weekend......

.....and my Evening Star celery plants still in the greenhouse for now. I nicked the idea of the bottomless pot to start drawing the plant upwards from Paul Bastow's blog. It's probably the only decent idea he's ever had.

Before we went away I thinned the long carrots in the raised slab bed to one per bore hole. I'm trying the 'cup' idea for the first time ever this season to see if it stops my boreholes drying out like they appeared to do last season, giving me badly forked roots and a compost mix that was dust dry.

I really don't know why it was so dry deep down but these cups allow me concentrate water around the carrot. Watering of long carrots is one of those things that there is no definite answer to and until now I've always been of the school of thought that once they were growing away I left them to it and they didn't get watered by me again. For some reason they didn't get enough moisture last year (the stumps were the same) so after listening to Ian Simpson's talk I decided i'd give it a go. Once the foliage is a tangled mass it will be impossible to water into the cups but by that time it'll make no odds and the root will be what it will be so I'll probably not be watering anyway.....there'll be a rook of other jobs to worry about.