The salad box develops..

The salad box is coming on very quickly, aided no doubt by the sunshine and showers that are more redolent of spring than flaming June.

I have had another bout of weeding the vegetable beds and planted out the remaining minicole cabbages and the marigolds for the rose bed.

I also got a Borlotti bean kit going that I’d bought for a pound in one of the local cheap shops.  These shops are offering a lot of gardening kits – including grow your own stuff – so I thought I’d see how they work.

Salad Box 23 June

Signs of life

We had a trip down to the allotment today, having not been down for a couple of weeks and there was much excitement as stuff is now growing.  There are signs of the potatoes coming through, the onion sets have taken and the peas are sprouting.  Gardening gives many opportunities for childlike wonder, the best is at harvesting time, but it is closely followed by the emergence of life from seeds, tubers or sets.

Onion set sprouting – unknown variety

Pea seedling – Kelvedon Wonder

We continued preparation of the sweet corn beds and expect to be planting out the first of the smaller ones (mini pop) next week.  They have overtaken the larger ones, which were slowed down by the potting on process.

We are not organic gardeners, there are times when a bit of assistance is required to keep the bugs and weeds at bay.  We had noticed that despite the site clearing and the membrane that weeds were emerging on the bed that will take the squashes, so we put weed killer on these and re-covered them.

Lynn admiring progress

 

More planting

There was more planting going on today as Lynn got the last of the spuds in. We have been given some onion sets and bought some pea seeds (Kelvedon Wonder), so we prepared a short bed for both of these and built a support frame for the peas and got both the peas and onion sets planted. Continue reading

Our garden

We have been growing vegetables in the garden for over 20 years and have developed a manageable set of plots within the confines of our relatively modest garden.  These include three 6’ by 4’ raised beds at the rear of the garden, a rhubarb patch and a south facing border with a blackcurrant and blackberry in it that we also used for sun-loving vegetables and salad crops.  The photo below taken last winter shows it looking very peaceful.

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