Busy Planting

It's been a busy week or so up at the allotment with planting and sowing in full swing. We've almost got all our main crop potatoes in with a row each of Cara and King Edwards in the ground and one more of King Edward still to go in this week. On the other side of the plot, next to the early spuds (in the foreground of the below pic) we've got a couple of rows of carrots and one each of beetroot, radish, salad leaves and little gem lettuce. After hardly direct sowing anything last year I've taken the plunge and am going to try and do far more that way this year, if nothing else it will stop the house getting overrun with seed trays.


The radish is the first through the soil with a decent number already showing their faces a week after sowing.


Down near the asparagus bed, in the bottom half of the plot, we've put in the 28 parsnips we started off at home. These survived the chitting/potting in loo rolls/planting out process fantastically, I wish we'd had more loo rolls so I could have done a few more really. Assuming the pests don't get them we're on course for a lovely crop later in the year all being well.

Next to those we've put our onions, roughly 250 of them (including 30 shallots) which seems a huge amount now I'm typing it but we found that we'd got through the 120 we did last year by February so thought we'd do more this year and see if we can be as close to self sufficient in these as possible.

Just when I'd given up hope of any broad beans there's signs of life in the seeds we put in a few weeks ago. Not all have come through (yet?) but it looks like we'll get 6 or 7 plants which has to be good as they were a bit of a last minute addition to the plot plan (he says as if there's actually a plan of some kind to the madness...).

With any luck, weather permitting, we'll get some of our pea varieties sown this week as well as that last row of spuds and then we'll be scarily on track for the year. Hope everyone else is doing well too...