Battered Broad Beans and Goosgog Chips

No, that's not a weak Scottish attempt at trying to get a healthy diet. But on Sunday I had to put in 60 odd broad beans to replace the ones that had disappeared over the winter; I had roughly 50 left and growing. other beans on the site look a lot healthier; what's the secret? maybe the weather was a lot better, soil warmer when they were planted? last year the Broad Beans were a magnificent sight.

I also tried to tidy up the old goosegog bush by opening it up a bit and sorting out some of the mesh of branches. Ended up with what looks like 18 cuttings. It's the wrong time of year to take cuttings, apparently, but the couple I accidentally took last year; snapping them off hamfistedly, have just sprouted over the last few days. If these cuttings do take then I might use some of them, but they might also make nice presents.

Chit! It's that Time already

Yes, it's that time already. Time to chit your taters, though the jury does seem to be out on whether it does any good anyway. As some people have been quibbling but the National Vegetable Society is pretty firm about it:

The "Chitting of seed tubers is one of the vital factors in successful potato cultivation. As potatoes are half hardy in Britain, to have good sturdy sprouts before planting will get the crop off to an excellent start. Early cultivars will mature up to two weeks earlier from properly chitted seed than from unchitted seed."

So, who am I to argue.

But I do have to make my mind up on which varieties to choose. And in this I shall take the wise advice of Dr Hessayon in his vegetable guide and Nigel Slater in the first volume of his Eat series.

I think this time I'll try to go for quantity, though inevitably I'll be seduced by taste, how different from real life.

Now Nigel reckons... to be continued when I get home

A Hot Bed of Activity

I love it when a plan sort of comes together even if it is all a bit synchronistic. The allotments are getting a delivery of horse poo this morning, straight from her maj Liz. All good stuff, but it does need to rot down for a year or so. That's a long time but I've had a bit of a brain wave; I'll use some of it to make a hot bed like the Victorian gardeners used to do to bring on veg and fruit early.

I had a dig around on the internet and turned up some interesting pages such as @ and also a very informative site @.

These cover all the basics. And then another layer of synchronicity was added when I looked through the recent blog postings on my blog roll and found this at Our Happy Acres where the latest post was about cold frames.

Which all fits rather nicely into building the lights to go on top of the hot beds to keep the heat in.

And what plants to force on? Well, I think I'll try strawberries and checking out how to force strawbs I found this book on google books .

This book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening might be worthwhile checking out for other nuggets of info.

But for the moment, I think I'll try strawberries, and then use the reduced heap to grow on melons, probably under the lights, as suggested here, depending on how hot the summer might be. A nice one might be Petit Gris de Rennes @, and Thompson & Morgan seem to have some nice melons. I must be maturing not a fnaaar in sight, doh!