My Tiny Plot

We harvested our first winter lettuce a couple of days ago from the sowings I did last October with Arctic King. It tasted great. Really smooth and buttery and not at all bitter like I expected for a lettuce that has been in the ground for 6 months! The problem is that only five of them made it through the winter. It’s definitely worth sowing winter lettuce if you have somewhere sturdy to overwinter them (my beautiful poly tunnel got ripped into three pieces by gale-force winds). However, I would recommend that you sow the seed in early September or October. I simply put the seed in too late and the seedlings didn’t have enough time to get strong before they came face to face with the brutal English winter.

Ryan is master of the smoothie. He makes them for us everyday and they are delicious - and also have the added benefit of being healthy (bonus!). He’s perfected his smoothie recipe over the past three months, adding a little bit here, taking away a little bit there. And the result is perfection itself; super sweet, not too thick, using ingredients that are not a pain to peel (which is actually a bigger deal than you think). Here it is:

Ryan’s Smoothie Recipe
- small can of pineapples in juice
- one banana
- two oranges
- one apple
- six ice cubes
blend them all together in a food processor.

This is the first sowing of Monty’s lettuce that I put in a few weeks ago in a propagator outside (without heat). I planted a few of each variety Little Gem, Aruba, Salad Bowl, Lobjoits Green, Merveille de Quatre Saison. I didn’t plant any All the Year Round but I did put a few directly in the soil up at mtp as they are the hardiest of the lot. They’ve come on very well. The Little Gem and Aruba are clear winners in the germination and reliability areas with Salad Bowl a close third. Lobjoits Green and 4 Seasons however were pretty poor when it came to germination. Only one of each came up and I had to re-sow some seed in both rows to fill the gaps.
We grew Little Gem last year and ended up with a glut of them come July. This year I really must get the successional planting pinned down. I find that I get busy doing other stuff and ‘forget’ to sow more seed. Then I wonder why we have a mass of salad one month and none the next. My plan is to sow one of each variety per week so that we always have a selection for the salad bowl.

Hooray! Four whole days off work and all the time in the world to do ‘plot stuff’. Up at mtp everything is growing. The gutter peas are off to a flying start as you can see. The rocket I planted back in January is ready for its first harvest and the onion sets are starting to sprout. Today, I planted a second row of carrots (as per the Carrot plan), planted two more purple sprouting broccoli plants under the cloche, did various weeding duties and potted up some comfrey (to stop it spreading). The plot was buzzing with people, mostly planting potatoes. It’s all starting again! And… we saw three hot-air balloons, a sure sign that Spring is here in Bath.

I planted my early potatoes at the weekend. It was a gorgeous day and I just couldn’t resist. They are Maris Bard. I dug two trenches 60cm apart and 10cm deep. Then I filled each trench with compost (half rotted as you see). Then planted the chitted potatoes around 30cm apart along the rows. Text book behaviour if you go by Sarah Raven’s book. I felt very smug once they were all in. I even had a few left over and promptly marched up to the ‘free seedlings’ bench to donate them and returned with a glow of self-satisfied smugness. Happy in the knowledge that my little troopers where in the ground. It didn’t last long. I soon bumped into someone else from the allotment who told me that Dennis (Allotment God) had declared it ‘too early’ for potatoes. Darn… as they say in polite neighbourhoods.

Over a month ago I instigated the ‘Carrot Plan’ in an effort to grow edible carrots this year. In part one I selected a ’stone free’ piece of the plot, dug in some sharp sand and covered with black plastic to warm up the soil. That done, we are now ready for part two. Last year one of my main problems was lack of germination. I planted my first carrot seeds on April 27th last year but they just didn’t germinate and as you can see from this picture it was clear that the soil was the problem. It was just too heavy and cloddy for the seedlings to push through. So this year we’re giving them a helping hand by making a nice deep hole with the dibber and filling it with soft, fluffy compost. On goes the fleece, and then we wait. I’m sowing Amsterdam Forcing which is an early variety suited to cold weather.