Most of my sowings from last week have already come up; in the potting shed, chinese cabbage
and lettuce
Outside in the wicker planter, both chicory and wild rocket have come up
I may get some autumn / winter salads after all.
I also have some larger seedlings in the potting shed. I went to a food festival a couple of months ago and one of the pop-up restaurants was giving away chilli seeds. Even though I thought it was probably too late for them to mature and produce any fruit this year, and unlikely I would be able to successfully over winter them I sowed a couple anyway... this is them now.
Will just have to see how I get on with them.
Once again my good intentions to sow successionally have fallen by the wayside, so today I attempted to rectify that by sowing a selection of lettuce (reine de glaces, little gem, romaine ballon and romana bougival), chicory, wild rocket, spring onions, chinese cabbage, calabrese and autumn king carrots. I'm about a month behind with the carrots so will just have to wait and see if anything comes up. It would be fantastic to have some to pull up on Christmas day.
On that subject, the potatoes for Christmas are coming along nicely; the plants are now peeking over the top of their sacks and looking very healthy
I gave them one last topping up with compost so they should be okay outside for a while yet.
Today's harvest made for a very pretty trug so I thought I'd share a picture of that too
I have decided that the peppers are actually sweet banana... I saw some similar plants in the garden centre today and they look exactly the same, plus the description that they ripen to orange then red was exactly what mine have done.
Similarly, I think that the orange chilli peppers are cheyenne because I saw them in the garden centre too... mystery solved.
The veg plot is pretty full at the moment. This is the view from the potting shed
More experienced gardeners would probably say that things are planted too close together... and they would be right, but I have a lot to fit into the space and it seems to be working okay so far.
I am now harvesting enough of a selection of veg every day so that I don't need to buy any from the shops. In the past few days I have continued to pick mange tout, peas, courgettes and turnips but also had the first potatoes (see patience is a virtue post), first shallots
and first pak choi (although I had to pick this because it bolted, I think they are supposed to grow bigger than this)
A couple of cabbages should also be ready in the next week or so.
I think I could still do better to keep it going for as long as possible. My successional sowing has fallen by the wayside, so I rectified this by sowing a selection of lettuces and salad leaves, chinese cabbage, chicory and some onions for pickling (the last lot didn't materialise into anything).
I also need to get some more root veg in the ground, or rather containers... for some reason they didn't grow in the raised bed so that got filled up with brassicas. The ones that I already have in containers are doing much better so I bought some builder's buckets today and need to get sowing.
I was hoping there would be more than two parts to my Bank Holiday Weekend gardening activities, but the bad weather has continued; yesterday it rained more or less constantly, and when it did let up there was a very cold wind blowing round the garden. Today has been better; there is still a chill in the air but the sun has come out every now and again. Nevertheless, over the course of the weekend I have been able to do a few more bits and pieces.
The jack o' lanterns have been planted out into reusable growbags.
I'll probably put squash in between them, once they are ready to go out.
I've planted out my beetroot (boltardy) plugs into a wicker planter and sowed some more undercover, and have continued sowing like there's no tomorrow; broccoli (psb & raab), cauliflower (all year round), pak choi (red choi), fennel (di firenze), chicory (radicchio palla rosso precoce), turnip (purple top milan) are all in small pots in the potting shed.
Outdoors sowings consist of a row of swede (best of all) in a raised bed with some previously planted out brassicas, and four types of radish (cherry belle, prinz rotin, french breakfast and hilds blauer herbst und winter) in a bulb crate.
The final batch of potatoes (rooster) have also been planted into potato sacks.
In the greenhouse I potted on the okra plants.
And finally, I purchased some sweet pepper (bellboy) and chilli pepper (apache) plants from the garden centre. I still haven't given up on the idea of germinating my own from seed even though my last (and was going to be final) attempt in the heated propagator only produced one chilli shake, and time is running out if they are going to have a long enough season to fruit and ripen. Might just give it one more go?!
