What I did today 2022

[ameno]

Sowed another short row of radishes.
Planted out half a dozen dwarf french bean plants.
Pruned two of the grape vines, and brought the prunings home to process into folly wine.

[Sweet savory]

2 little gem lettuce to make a decent meal and a carrot from the trough. I am very impressed with the results from the lidl 99p seeds. They are all a decent size and healthy. The next tub has been planted and the seedlings have been thinned and covered with net.
French beans, mangetout peas and alderman peas, a couple of mini tomatoes and a cucumber. Slowly harvesting the red onions.

[Bren In Pots]

Tipped out 2 containers of Charlottes, watered GH and removed tom armpits, planted out more lettuce. Pulled out bolted mustard spinach.

[ameno]

Cut down the second early potatoes (Jazzy). The leaves were pretty yellow at this point, anyway, and since blight is starting to spread about on my allotment site I thought I might as well just cut them down now to reduce the risk.
Also finished cutting the leaves off of my onions, then bagged them all and took them to the tip, along with some other garden waste which I couldn't shred or compost myself.

[ameno]

De-blighted my maincrop potatoes again. Filled another bucket with leaves. All in all they are holding up surprisingly well, though, and are resisting it better than I expected. I am growing a different variety to previous years, so maybe this one is a bit more resistant? This hot, dry weather probably helps, too.

Also cut the leaves off half of my onions, as they are pretty much at their limit now, the leaf fungus having almost killed them. I was planning on doing all of them, but the bag I brought to stuff the leaves into wasn't big enough...

[Sweet savory]

Watering plot every other (early) morning for the foreseeable future it seems. At least the main crop carrots have germinated and have had very little in the way of slug attention due to the dry conditions.
Harvested a few of my red onion sets . They almost all bolted so am using as I take them.
Also picked the first climbing peas and some mangetout. These last appear to be giving up rather soon, presumably due to the drought. The climbing peas were planted over a trench filled with veg peelings and grass clippings but the mangetout were just added as an after thought at the end of the row so didn’t get the same benefit and I think that’s the difference.

[ameno]

Went to the allotment after work today and watering pretty much everything.
I was last there on Saturday, and I was shocked by how much everything had grown in just 3 days. The sweet potatoes have grown almost another foot, and the squash plants a good 18 inches.

Also have 9 melons developing now, and one squash.

[fimblefowl]

Cleared brambles and nettles away from the stile leading out of our garden into the field. Probably built ~200 years ago as a route to the church, just visible.

[Jungle Jane]

We haven’t had good rain either,I dug two holes for more broccoli on Thursday & it was so dry,water took longer to drain (I fill the hole with water then plant) I gave the pear & apple tree 10 litres each for a deep watering,I rarely water them but drought conditions affect them.

[Bren In Pots]

Gave my parsnips, and french beans a good soaking we've had no real rain for ages.

[ameno]

Did some watering and liquid feeding.
Bagged up another developing melon in a net bag to protect it from slugs. That's four developing now.

Also, I noticed that my maincrop potatoes are starting to get blight already, although it seems not to be spreading too quickly yet. Went around and removed all of the suspect-looking leaves. Ended up with just over a bucket full of them.
For some reason this year, the blighted leaves are so far concentrated almost entirely on the bottom-most, oldest leaves. This seems pretty unusual to me, as usually middle-aged leaves seem to be the first infected (they lack the vigour of youth to protect them, but they are still fully exposed to the air and rain, and so spores get onto them easily).
I'm not sure yet whether this unusual phenomenon is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, the old leaves in the shade of all of the other leaves are the least useful for the plant and have the least ability to photosynthesise, and so even if I have to remove them the plant doesn't really lose much from it. But on the other hand, they are closest to the soil and therefore the tubers, and so therefore might increase the risk of the actual potatoes becoming infected. In previous years, although my main crop have always gotten foliage blight, I have managed to avoid any infected tubers. Hopefully this year won't be different.

[annie8]

Did some ‘encouraging’ of pollination between male and female squash flowers.

[ameno]

A whole load of weeding, and gave some poultry manure to the asparagus and rhubarb.

[Jungle Jane]

I just put the second & last blowaway in the shed,there’s tomatoes & a cucumber in its place on the patio. Lifted the red onions & garlic,they’re in the shed drying on the blowaway shelves. Where the garlic was,I planted out a spare squash & courgette. Watered everything. Squashed some aphids on my bean leaves. Yesterday I cut the tops off my first bag of Charlotte potatoes,I’ll lift them soon Earthed up the few carrots that are growing so they don’t get green shoulders. Squashed some leaf miners in my pea leaves. Squashed some cabbage weevil that I’ve got for the first time here.

[ameno]

Sowed some more pre-sprouted dwarf french beans and did some weeding.