A different way with cabbages

At the recent talk from Clive Bevan he said that he grew his giant cabbages in large bottomless pots set into the soil. The idea is that the lower leaves are kept up off the main body of soil and are therefore out of reach of slugs.

It also allows better air circulation beneath the plants and because the lower leaves aren't actually resting on the soil they won't rot off and spread to other leaves. With all this in mind I have set these pot rings into the bed I'm going to grow my cabbages this season. I will tamp down the soil inside them so they're rock hard and plant into this during the next few days. The varieties I'm growing are Brigadier (green) and Red Drumhead.

I shall have to make sure I water more regularly than usual so that they don't go short once established, and I will also be covering all the plants with a cover of some form to keep butterflies off. A few weeks ago I gave this bed a good dose of general fertiliser with added seaweed meal. I will foliar spray during the season once the plants are well rooted.

Visit to Medwyns

Right.....that's enough of being totally and utterly right about the two faced knobsharks currently clinging to power by their fingernails.

Yesterday I went on lovely day to Bangor....as the song goes. To be precise it was a coach trip organised by North East Derbyshire NVS DA to Medwyn William's greenhouse at Bangor University to see his veg prior to being harvested and prepared for Chelsea. It was a real eye opener and show veg on a grand scale although he is ably assisted these days by his son and daughter-in-law among others. His onions weren't as big as he would have hoped so I shall be interested to see how big they get in the next couple of weeks prior to the Show.

After a couple of hours at Bangor we then went onto Anglesey (with tour guide commentary from the great man himself) to the field where he grows his brassicas. He also has an enormous polytunnel where he had his potatoes in raised Link-a-bord beds. The haulms had been cut down as the skins need 10+ days to harden up being grown so early in the year. He did dig up one tuber of the new white variety Casablanca whilst we were there and I must say it's going to be one to look out for. It will be giving Winston a run for its money before too long I feel sure.

As soon as I can find the lead to our digital camera I shall download a few photos of a marvellous day out.

Tonight's weather forecast

The recent shower of shit that has prevailed over the British Isles (13 years and counting) will continue overnight but will disappear by morning, when brighter spells should follow.

First spuds bagged

I planted 24 bags of Winston spuds last weekend in large flexible polypots. Using sieved compost the idea is to grow your spuds in a sterile growing medium with added nutrients so that the potatoes come out clean as a whistle with no scab. I put a couple of inches of compost in the bag and then a handful of both Vitax Q4 and calcified seaweed, and give it all a good stir.



A couple more inches of compost is put on top of this and the seed spud placed into this layer.



The bags are filled with more compost and then planted into trenches into which I worked some manure. On top of this I gave a good scattering of slug pellets. Soil is drawn around the outside of the bags to keep them in place. And that's about it. As the compost sinks I'll top up until no more can fit in the bags, by which time the haulms should be up.

This method worked very well for me last season. I believe by putting the nutrients below the seed spud, as the new tubers swell their skins don't come into contact with it and you don't risk marking the skins. The roots will use up the feed and then work through the bottom of the bag and into the manure outside the bag. Winston takes about 12 weeks to grow to maturity, and as it is a variety that can grow very large I didn't bother rubbing off any shoots.

For spuds that are shy to grow very large I will reduce to 2 shoots. Maxine is an example of one I find hard to get decent size on. I will also put a handful and a half of the two feeds. Not very scientific I know but you have to do what works for you.


Meanwhile, my experiment to get some spuds for a July show is progressing slowly. The foliage is up but doesn't seem to be growing very quickly. I'm bringing these pots in and out of the greenhouse depending on the weather forecast, and it is a bit of a ball-ache.

Am I the only one who's spotted the similarity?

Mandelson.........

The child catcher. Spooky eh?

'Splitting' shallots

You have to be very dedicated (or indeed a sad pr*ck like me) to want to grow shallots to show standard. They will of course split naturally of their own devices but to get the very best shaped bulbs I believe you have to help them along a little bit and thin them out. I do this as soon as the outer skin casing on the parent bulb starts to split, and for me this was last weekend. Here is one of my large exhibition shallots prior to thinning.

Here is the same bulb looking from above....you can see there are actually 6 or 7 bulblets.

I carefully peel the old flesh from around these small bulbs and snap out the surplus bulblets to leave 4 that are growing in opposite directions in order to maximise their potential size. I try to get as much flesh stripped from the clump as this will only rot otherwise. Here is the thinned clump from above. In the past I have thinned down to 2 or 3 but Dave Thornton (who gave me the original stock) is adamant I should leave 4.

I'm left with many small, flat-sided thinnings that you can use in omelettes. I prefer to replant these in a shady spot and I do find that they root and grow away and can become reasonable pickling shallots with a bit of luck.

Here is my bed with all the shallots thinned down. They sulk for a day or two but soon prick up and grow away strongly with a top dressing of dried blood. I think this is the earliest I have ever done this, despite the late start my shallots had getting green tops. The remaining bulblets are now all strong looking so I'm hopeful of getting some good quality exhibits this season.

You've blown it now Gerrard!

You vindictive, rat-eating, cheating scouse tw*t! There's no way you're having the honour of having one of my pumpkins named after you now! Bastard!

Carrots are go

In the words of Ron Jeremy you need a nice tight hole and moisture at all times. Following his expert advice I've achieved 100% germination rate on my Sweet Candle stump carrots by making sure the compost surface has never been allowed to dry out. Growing in such a free draining mixture as we do it's easy for the top inch of the bore hole to dry out very quickly in warm weather, meaning the seed will either not germinate or worse, the seedlings will burn off just after germination. As I always go home for lunch I've been able to water if necessary during the hottest part of the day, and it has certainly paid off.

With my stumps I've also kept the bore holes quite tight, just 3" dia, with no extra boring out from a crow bar. I just cored out a long plug of sand with a length of plastic pipe and left it at that. I been thinking about this for a while (and it may well backfire) as I figured it was wasteful to have a 4" dia bore hole when the carrots are generally no more than 40mm dia. I also think a tighter hole will help to get straighter roots come harvest time, although I will have to be careful that the carrots don't split when extracted from the confines of their tighter than usual straightjacket....although I think frequency of watering has more to do with this.

This is the first year I sowed my stump carrots before the long ones. The reason being that Sweet Candle needs anything from 18 to 22 weeks to form the stump end, which is always the last bit of the carrot to develop. Also, I suffered poor germination with long carrots the last couple of seasons, late March sowings succumbing to cold weather in early April. My long carrots have now been in for nearly 2 weeks and should start popping through soon.

"Oh f*ck"

You are the weakest link.....goodbye! (And good riddance!)

Progress

Most of my Sweet Candle stations have now germinated.

These are the first parsnips 'Pinnacle' that came through and are therefore the biggest......a long way to go yet though.

My shallots are starting to split naturally but I will be helping these along at the weekend I think. More on that then. Needs weeding too!

The first 8 tomato plants 'Cedrico' were potted on last night. These will be planted out towards the middle of May and I shall be growing these slightly differently this season to try and maximise yield towards the end of the season for some late shows.

I have 5 pumpkins that have germinated well, and I have named them Gerrard, Reina, Ngog, Kuyt and Carragher. I will probably only grow 3 of these and give the other 2 away.

I haven't often grown long beet but I have decided to have another crack this year with a view to perhaps displaying a set of 3 at Malvern. There were only a couple of entries last year so I figured I may have a chance of a ticket if I can grow a reasonable set. I don't usually like growing in pipes but decided on this method for long beet (var. Cheltenham Green Top), with 8 black plastic 8" dia. waste tubes set into a couple of drums that in turn are set into a raised metal bed. The metal bed and drums have been filled with sieved compost from the compost heap that were well sterilised with some Jeyes fluid. The pipes were filled with the same mix as I used for my carrots. I was given various mixes to try but after speaking to Dave Thornton he said he used his carrot mix last season and grew his best long beet ever, culminating in first place at Westminster for a tap root collection. A cluster of seeds were sown half an inch deep in the middle of each pipe. You don't often see CGT on the benches, most top growers using 'Regar' but I prefer the look of CGT when grown well.

First carrots through

Photos to follow but my first Sweet Candle stump rooted carrots came through in the raised beds today, approximately two weeks after sowing. I shall need to crack on with making some enviromesh covers now, so that I don't have a recureence of last season's carrot fly nightmares.

I have had to re-sow about 15 parsnip stations as I just wasn't happy with the seedlings that emerged. I have placed chitted seed of Polar F1 in these positions but I have marked them with a white label so that I can tell them apart from the Pinnacle variety in the other stations come harvest time. Sod's Law has dictated that there was no pattern to to the failed Pinnacles so there is now a mix of roots in each drum.

A couple of days ago my pumpkins all emerged so I now have 5 plants growing strongly. The patch of land a few miles away that I grew 'Heidi' on last year has been rotovated by the owners and they say they are ready for me when I am. I wasn't going to bother trying to grow a big'un again but they insisted. I think they enjoyed watching her grow as much as I did. Hopefully I won't get swine flu or anything similar at a critical time this season and I can manage the plants rather than leaving them to their own devices. I feel sure I could have grown a 400 pounder if I hadn't been so close to death. I shall have to think of a different name for the biggest Heidi daughter. If Liverpool beat Chelsea this weekend 'Gerrard' is a distinct possibilty.

I potted my first batch of Cedrico tomatoes into 3.5" pots tonight, but the 2nd batch sown a couple of weeks ago seems very slow to germinate for some reason and I only have 3 seedlings up yet. The greenhouse is now bulging with peppers, aubergines, onions and a single cucumber plant which is another earlier than usual sowing as far as I'm concerned, in order to try and have a couple of cu's for the mid-July show I'm hoping to enter for the first time this season.

I am now hardening off my leeks, cabbages, brussels and 8oz onions with a view to planting these out in the next week or so. However, with colder air coming down from the north over the weekend I may have to postpone this, even bring some younger plants back into the greenhouse for a short while again.

Today I had some very good news about a trip I shall be making on the 9th May. I shall give more details nearer the time but all I shall say for now is that I can barely contain my excitement. When you realise (as I did after accepting) that I will be missing the deciding games of the Premiership it will give you an idea of how important it must be.

Early days

Still plenty of work needs to be done before April is out but things are starting to come together. I have plenty of onions from sets growing in cell trays as this is quite a popular class where I live. I am growing red onion 'Red Baron' and also 'Setton' which I've grown before and give nice, regularly shaped, flattish bulbs that could even be entered in the 'under 8oz' class. I like to start sets off in cell trays in the greenhouse in February rather than straight into the ground as birds can tug them out when they're looking for nesting material. After a couple of weeks of hardening off I shall now be planting these out this weekend. At the top of the picture you can see my exhibition shallots which are looking really good since they were planted out a couple of weeks ago. These will be ready for splitting in 2 or 3 weeks I think.

I have two long raised beds where one day I shall erect a polytunnel to be able to grow my onions and leeks under cover. The left hand one has white rot in the soil so I have treated it with Basamid soil sterilent. The soil has to be covered over for a few weeks whilst the chemical reaction takes place, hence the various compost bags. This is lethal stuff and has to be used very carefully so I used disposable plastic gloves whilst I was applying it, especially after licking my fingers last season when eating a pizza despite having washed my hands. I immediately felt quite nauseous. Soft twat.

The first potato shoots are showing through the compost in these experimental buckets that I set up to see if I could get some exhibition quality spuds for a show in early July. The large pots contain the sieved compost and nutrients (and the potato!) and this pot is set into some soil inside a large builder's bucket. The roots will grow through the bottom of the pot into this soil. The idea was to be able to keep them in the greenhouse during March when night temperatures were low. I can put them outside if the forecasts are favourable and bring them inside again if low temperatures are on the cards. It will get a bit more awkward once the foliage grows but as I only have 3 Kestrel and 3 Winston it won't be too much of a chore.

In the same greenhouse my boxed up dahlia tubers are showing the first green shoots. I should be able to start taking cuttings within a couple of weeks.

A couple of weeks ago I replaced my leaky garage roof with a nice bright, shiny, waterproof tin one. I can now shelter indoors during downpours whereas before I would have been drier if I'd stayed outside. Whilst I was up on the roof I saw my garden from a whole new angle and took this photo. Sadly, neither of my neighbours share my passion for gardening!

My Prayer

Dear Lord,

I know that I haven't talked to you that much, but this past year you have taken away one of my favourite actors, Patrick Swayze, my favourite actress, Farah Fawcett and my favourite musician, Michael Jackson.

I just wanted to let you know that my favourite Prime Minister and politician is Gordon Brown, my favourite football team is Chelsea and my favourite vegetable pest is carrot fly.

Amen.

First carrot seeds sown

A long day but I've got 32 out of my 48 carrot stations sown. I got 24 in the raised slab and wooden plank bed in the foreground and another 8 in the first of 3 drums against the fence. As I keep saying this is really too close for top quality roots and I know top growers will only put 3 or 4 in drums, but I took great care coring out the holes with the plastic tubing and then finishing off with a crowbar. I really do think that as carrot foliage is so fine and 'willowy' it can get away with close planting, especially as each hole will hopefully have equal amounts of nutrients. It's all down to the amount of time and care and attention you put into the preparation of the growing medium. You cannot rush the mixing but have to turn it over again and again until you're sure everything is nice and evenly mixed. (see my compost & nutrient mix in a previous posting). If germination is nice and even hopefully subsequent growth will be too. I hope to erect a mesh cover over all my long roots before the seedlings get too big to deter carrot fly (and canker in the case of my parsnips).


So I only have two more drums to fill which I'll do over the next couple of evenings and then it's onto the potato planting. But I always feel relieved when the carrot and parsnips are sown as it's most of the really hard work is now done. Here is the view looking from the bottom of my garden towards my carrot and parsnip drums. This time next year I'm hoping to have a walk-in structure over the entire area.

Parsnip woes

Today is long carrot seed sowing day. The drums are ready, the sun is out but I'll be in the garage all day sieving compost & preparing the mixes. Photos will follow later hopefully.

However, my 'Pinnacle' parsnips are starting to concern me. They came through very erratcially and I still have about 6 stations that haven't come through at all. After all that banging on about pre-chitting your seed for some reason it hasn't worked very well for me this year. And those seedlings that have emerged are very small, pallid, sickly looking specimens. I've taken the precaution of putting some more seed on damp tissue paper in a tupperware container to chit, the variety being Polar another F1 variety that I haven't grown before. If Pinnacle shows no sign of motoring on in the next few days I will have no hesitation in scrapping the lot and starting again with this new batch. It will soon catch up I have no doubt.

Meanwhile, I shall make my annual plea for people to make sure they have slug pellets to hand that can be used SENSIBLY! Nothing deals with snails and slugs like pellets and I have to laugh at some of the remedies offered up on various gardening forums. By all means f*ck about with beer traps, piles of bran, copper bands and meditation but rest assured that none of these methods actually f*cking work! Once I have done my carrots I shall scatter some pellets on each drum. Past experience has taught me that slugs and snails have no problem climbing several feet to crawl over sharp sand to eat my newly emerged carrot seedlings. In fact scientists have shown that these little critters can in fact crawl over razor blades without any adverse damage to their snotty selves! F*ckers!