Collecting seeds

Whichever way you look at it, the season is coming to a premature end.

The long hot summer has put paid to many of the inground crops, such as forcing our turnips into bolting, or shorting us on the strawberries. So now the flowers and beans are coming to an end and we need to start collecting seeds for next year.

The flower department is definitely The Wife's concern. So she has been collecting seed heads from the various flowers.

Don't ask me which is which. I can only spot the Soya Beans and the Petunias in that lot. But she knows what they all are.

Meanwhile I'm tidying up the plot, cutting back the triffid (which does have quite a good selection of grapes on it this year) and harvesting spuds and such.

We have also picked our first melon. Well not so much picked, as it fell off, so it must be ripe. The other one in the greenhouse is slightly larger. These are Honey Dew melons from Sainsbury's. Not so much from a seed packet, but from an actual Honey Dew directly. They were an experiment. And possibly one of our more successful experiments at that.

Apples are from our tree (still no idea what variety it is), but because we don't use any pesticides and this year, I didn't put up any Codling Moth traps, we're rather inundated with grubs in the apples.

Ah well, as the old saying goes, there's only one thing worse than finding a maggot in your apple and that's finding half a maggot in your apple.

Too much sunshine

There has been a bit of a gap in the blog posts recently. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly there is an issue of redundancy. I am currently in the process of going through redundancy consultations with my current employer which has taken my focus away from other things. Secondly there is a health matter. This hot weather has not done my asthma any favours and I had to go to hospital due to getting flu and restricted breathing problems.

Happy to say that both issues have now been resolved, and I can once again focus on the plot.

I have managed to feed the plot enough water that it has escaped the worst of the solar onslaught, however not all have remained unscathed. Firstly the turnips seemed to give up the ghost and just bolted straight to seed.

Rather than waste the bed, The Wife pulled them all and planted Cape Gooseberries in place.

Despite an earlier loss of some of the courgette plants, it seems that a couple of them survived and these, along with the replacements, are now starting to churn out the little marrows in great quantity. Now despite them all coming from the same seed stock, we have a variety of types being produced ranging from the normal greens, to yellows, to a yellow/green mix with strange ribs. Just goes to show that courgettes seeds don't always breed true.

The petunias are certainly putting on a good show though. Almost everybody who walks past the plot comments on them. But then, I suppose, that was the whole point of them being there.

The spud foliage (Maris Peers) is now starting to die down, which means it's time to dig them up, or empty the bags as appropriate.

It seems that the ones in the baskets and buckets have not done as well as those in the big bags. No idea about those in the ground as yet. They'll probably get dug up next weekend.

Now one thing that has been an experiment, which seems to have worked in this weather is the melons. These were seeds saved from a supermarket honeydew melon. We didn't really expect much from them, but yes, we do have a couple of melons growing in the greenhouse.

And finally, the sweetcorn is now starting to ripen. Whether we'll be able to actually eat any this year remains to be seen, but there is a marked difference between the two varieties that we are growing.

The ones on the left are an organic variety. The ones on the right are our standard "popcorn" variety that we've been growing for a few years now. Notice the difference in the heights of the plants. The popcorn's seem to have two or three cobs per plant compared to the organics only having one.


We're used to having oddities being found at the plot. But here is one I have never before seen. An albino garden spider. It was hiding in the red sun flowers, and it certainly knew how to hide. no sooner had I turned the leaf over than it scuttled off to hide again, so this is the best shot of it that I managed.

Still, I hope Spid survives. It's certainly got a better chance than I have in this heat. Garcon! Something cool and refreshing s'il vous plait.

Clean up

It's been cold recently so we're way behind on getting things organised down the plot. One of the main things we need to do is clean the greenhouse. It's a bit of a mess in there.

But first, coffee...

It was rather tricky to wrestle the shelving units out now that we have the second greenhouse facing the first. But we managed to get it sorted in the end.

Though the pallet wood table was a real pig to move out. It needs a damn good clean as there are plenty of spiders making a home in out, as well as a few mouse droppings all over the place. Guess they've been after our seeds.

We pulled out the old weed membrane and decided to put down a layer of wood chip before we put in a new lot of membrane. This should give us a put of a cushion and allow us to try and level the tables a little better.

Needless to say, after a few hours cleaning, we still haven't finished. Let alone started on the second greenhouse. So at the moment a lot of stuff has been left outside overnight.

We'll be back tomorrow. Well, I will be anyway. The Wife is off gallivanting about with her friends. I think she calls it "shopping".

Meanwhile, we tried an old trick to get some melon seeds started. Wet newspaper wrapped in plastic. Things seem to have started ok.

Of course, it's going to be too cold to leave these fragile things at the allotment, so all we did is pot them up ready to be taken back home to a nice warm kitchen. We can't even consider starting seeds yet. It's just too damn cold.

But that hasn't seemed to affect the onions...

Or the rhubarb...