Undisciplined Pak Choi

As expected, our pak choi has run to seed.

They’re rather fussy - they don’t like long days, and there isn’t a great deal we can do about this.

Happily, when we visited Tesco, we found that their pak choi has bolted too. This makes us feel much better.

Health Foods

One of the benefits to having an allotment is that access to a plentiful supply of fresh produce helps you eat more healthily.

So having harvested some of our wild rocket, we made some pizza.

What are we growing?

In the soil:

Potatoes: Jersey Royal (huge) and Charlotte (just come up)
Tomatoes: Sub Arctic, Gardener’s Delight and Brandywine. Covered in aphids.
A marigold: to encourage hoverflies, which kill aphids. Yet to flower.
Pak Choi. Still young, yet looks like it’s going to bolt any second.
Wild Rocket. Started slowly, but it’s started to perk up a bit.
Swiss Chard. Looking good.
Spinach: Tetona. Very healthy. And tasty.
Radish: Scarlet Globe. The first batch was eaten by slugs and flea beetle, but the second batch is looking better.
One courgette plant: Zucchini. Planted without being hardened off. Doesn’t want to stay upright.
Beetroot. I think. I don’t know what a beetroot seedling looks like. A profusion of different plants have started growing where we sowed these, and they surely can’t all be weeds.
Garlic: Cristo. Has many large shoots.
Spring Onion: White Lisbon. Growing extremely slowly.
Onions: Turbo, Sturon, Red Baron, Stuttgarter Giant. All have large shoots which collapse easily.
Carrots: Early Nantes, Chantenay, Paris Market. Still tiny.
Dwarf French Beans: Safari. Sowed today.
Peas: Waverex (Petit Pois). The first double row has germinated magnificently, and we’ve just sown a second batch.
Sweetcorn: Kelvedon Glory. Sowed today under bottle cloches.
Some random lines of lettuce. Not yet emerged.


Still to go in:

Tomatoes (Sungold and Costoluto Fiorentino)
Coriander
Basil
Choi Sum

Our potato plants

We have two batches of potatoes. The Jersey Royals to the right are now the size of trees.

The ones on the left are Charlotte potatoes in April. A few weeks wait, and up they popped.

Our first mini-harvest

Today our first crop - a radish - was ready.

According to the textbooks, they are supposed to take four weeks to get to this stage. Ours took nine.

We took it home with some baby spinach thinnings, and Amy transformed them into a delicious micro-salad.

Very tall tomatoes

Our tomato plants have become alarmingly enthusiastic. We moved them from our windowsill to the cold frame, but they were too tall, and started to push against the roof. So we had to plant them in the soil.

Fleece

The organic vegetable grower is annoyed by a variety of small monsters. In the foreground, horticultural fleece covers the pak choi and spinach, to prevent flea beetle from punching holes in them. To the right a fleece thwarts the carrot fly. To the rear, more fleece protects our peas from birds, mice, and the pea moth.

Plop

Potatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow. We bunged these in the ground two months ago – and look!