Long Hot Summer

For those of you worried about Seedney the Window Sill, be not afraid Seedney is well and thriving with my Babies of Hotness.

At the moment we have two Early Jalapenos, two Orange Habaneros and a Dorset Naga. The heat of chillies is measured on the Scoville scale. Jalapenos generally rank between 3,500 and 5,000 scoville units. Habaneros come in at approximately 350,000 scoville units, as you can see things are heating up. The Dorset Naga is special, once ranked as the hottest chilli in the world, it comes in at a whopping 1,000,000 scoville units (yes 1 million).

Now I eat jalapenos on a regular basis with no problem. I've tried habaneros and have to admit that they are pretty hot. The question is "what am I going to do with the chillies from the Dorset Naga?", and the answer is I'm going to try at least one of them just so that I can say I have.

If anyone would like some chillies to try please let me know. I'm hoping the jalapenos will be along soon, both plants are already in flower so it shouldn't be too long.

A great surprise puts us back on track..

On Sunday last week it was raining...pouring...deluging... it was a tad wet!  We didn't go to see Doug, seemed a little pointless.  We did a brief visit on Tuesday after work (thank goodness for the lighter evenings now) and were relieved to find no lasting damage from the recent wind/rain/hail/frost etc.

 Today was a very different matter.  We had more marigolds and a replacement batch of purple french beans to plant out, along with some replacement carrot seeds and other seeds for our "cut-and-come-again" section.  We also needed to do a considerable amount of weeding.  Our plot appears to be teeming with horsetail - one of those delightful weeds which is almost impossible to eradicate.  Phil and I between us spent nearly two hours hoeing and on our hands & knees pulling up a variety of weeds.  The upside was that during my weeding, I discovered some parsnip plants which had survived and a considerably larger number of beetroot plants than I had expected to see, I even found a solitary leek!  Almost all of the potato plants appear to have now sprouted above ground. It could prove to be quite a harvest!  Some of the fruit bushes are beginning to show signs of fuiting too, the rhubarb is going from strength to strength and the strawberries are definitely in full bloom.

Phil sowed a row of purple carrots and a row of orange ones (the last two rows simply never even materialised!)  He also planted the marigolds, while I put in a row of lollo rosso lettuce, a row of radishes and inserted the beans next to the wigwam which Phil had erected.  I also topped up the beetroot row with some extra seeds in the gaps.

Phil's final task was to harvest some more of our delicious purple sprouting broccoli.  While he was doing this, a few bees arrived to take advantage of the yellow flowers so we decided to keep it outside the netting.  While he was putting the netting back over the cauliflowers however, we had our biggest surprise.  Three, count them, THREE cauliflowers ready to harvest.  We had no idea they were even close to being ready but there they were, large as life.  Absolutely amazing!

  We're really loving this growing lark :)

A bit of a cog in the works...

We learnt something important today: you can indeed use too much slug repellent.  For once, more is not better [sigh.]

We got to Doug today to find that we had lost our entire selection of tomato and french bean plants as well as our second attempt at growing a pumpkin and another complete row of marigolds! The two rows of carrots have just never materialised and the beetroot is looking suspiciously sparse...

We are, however, undeterred.  More of the potatoes are beginning to peek out above the soil and manure, the purple sprouting broccoli gave us another fine harvest and the broad beans are already showing signs of producing some good pods.

We took the time to give the areas of failed planting a good dig-over and most of the rest of the plot a thorough weeding.  The grass edges of the path have been neatened and the peas propped up again.  
We've planted a third batch of marigolds, a few of the ecinacea plugs and a patch of wildflowers to help encourage the vital insect life.  

The herb patch is continuing to thrive - we just need some recipes for lemon balm as this is clearly growing much more quickly than we expected.  The garlic and onions are all still looking excellent.  The fruit bushes appear to be flourishing and we had a new fruit - a jostaberry - recommended to us (another purple/black fruit so bound to be a winner!)

Once we got home, I planted another batch of both types of tomato and will do the same with the french beans.  All is not lost, we'll just be a couple of weeks behind but that's not such a big deal since the weather has been so cold recently there wouldn't have been as much growth as there was earlier in the year.  I'm sure our next post will be even more positive :)

Doug the Allotment: It's all kicking off!

Doug the Allotment: It's all kicking off!: Well we're back from holiday and back on the allotment, and everything is sprouting up all over the place! And for those of you who think we...

It's all kicking off!

Well we're back from holiday and back on the allotment, and everything is sprouting up all over the place! And for those of you who think we're neglecting Nigel he's doing fine. In fact the potato sacks and pots are going great guns. Hopefully in a month or so from now we will be eating our first purple potatoes! I'm very excited!! As for Seedney the window sill he's doing very well growing my babies of hotness!

We harvested another basket of purple sprouting broccoli yesterday and turned it into psb and stilton soup - and bloody lovely it was as well. We also used mint from Nigel and rosemary from Doug to cook some new potatoes and roast lamb yesterday. It all just tastes that little bit better when you know where (some of) your food has come from.

Most of our time yesterday was spent planting new crops. We have extra French beans and a Borlotti bean, that Lyta planted at River Cottage, growing now as well as three types of tomatoes. I'm just hoping they survive the late frosts we're getting. Mary also planted some marigolds as apparently they help combat white fly. Anything that gets rid of parasites is good with me!

We picked up a horseradish plant as well the other day and I planted that out as well. I love horseradish sauce (there's a shocker) so I'm looking forward to that growing and then making a sauce to see if I can blow the top of my head off!

You may notice in some of the photos that we I have become rather obsessed with slug pellets. It's just that I'm paranoid that after all of our hard work we will start to loose stuff to the damned slugs and snails. We've just planted out another pumpkin plant as the three we had planted out previously were eaten down to the ground. You could barely tell that anything had even been there!

Anyway, that's it for now. Thanks for reading and hopefully more to follow next week.

Today was a momentous day, and in honour of that I'm writing in purple, we harvested our very first crop from our very own allotment. Yes, we picked purple sprouting broccoli from Doug today. And bloody Delicious it was as well, especially when served with a blue cheese sauce.

We spent most of the morning watering our crops, due to the incredibly warm weather we've been experiencing recently. We also covered over the brasiccas, beans and alliums to hopefully prevent the butterflies and pigeons devastating all of our hard work.

I was looking back over some old photographs earlier today and it was amazing to see the tiny plug plants we had put in five and half months ago now either ready for harvesting as in the case of the broccoli or coming along really well like the cauliflowers and savoy cabbages.

One of the most amazing things we noticed this week was that the peas we were growing in the greenhouse had already started to set pods. We were advised to nip these out so as to encourage further growth on the plant.

It really is a fruitful time just now with the soft fruit bushes coming along very nicely and potatoes starting to shoot and showing signs of doing very well indeed. We've also got five chilli plants on Seedney the windowsill now from Seaspring seeds that were bought at River Cottage last weekend; they are two jalapenos, two habaneros and a Dorset naga. The naga tops the scales at a million scoville heat units and I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it!

Anyway we will be back on Doug on Good Friday to do what we can before we head off on a well earned break down to West Bay.

Spring has sprung (for now)

Well it's been a while since I took responsibility for writing the blog so after a productive morning on the allotment I thought I would put fingers to keyboard and drone on for a while.

It was our first visit to Doug for a while where we could actually do any sort of sustained work. The past few weeks the ground has either been too frozen or in the case of last week too wet. I think if we had tried last week we would have ended up with an allotment that looked like a film set for one of the more gory scenes of War Horse.

However, this morning was a real shorts and t-shirts job and we got stuck into it. Between Mary and I we managed to plant out three more rows of potatoes (more Purple Majesty and some Pink Fir Apple), a new purple gooseberry that we picked up the other week that's sprouting well, some oregano for the herb patch along with some purple basil (though to be honest neither of us is holding out much hope for the basil) and a few more broad bean plants to replace those that got battered by the frosts earlier in the year. We've also been advised to get our pea plants into the ground so that's on the list for next week.

After the planting it was a case of some long overdue weeding and tidying up - that seems to be one of those jobs that never goes away. Why do weeds grow quicker and better than the plants you want to grow? Over to you boffins!

The established crops are all looking really good at the moment. All of our fruit canes and bushes are coming well into bud or are already in leaf. if everything was to fruit heavily there will be an awful lot of jam doing the rounds; you have been warned. All of the brassicas are starting to get nice and leafy; I've been really surprised how few we lost to insects and cold. Here's hoping our luck holds. The best surprise though was the shoots starting to come through on the purple sprouting broccoli. Suddenly I find myself looking forward to eating veg as we will have grown it!

All of the onions and garlic seem to be coming along nicely although Mary and I did stump ourselves this morning. We asked ourselves the question of "when do you harvest garlic?" and neither of us really had any idea, so some research required there or answers on the back of a postcard please!