Don't Lose The Plot: Some Gardening At Last

Since my last text post 11 days ago things have been busier than ever down the plots. Having spent a great deal of this growing season re-organising various areas of my plots, building raised beds, moving and repairing sheds, erecting then re-erecting a poly tunnel, moving tons of soil and still clearing out weed infested areas of N2 Plot, much of my sowing and planting has been a secondary consideration, to a greater extent.

2nd Batch of Onions (124) Drying Out N2 Plot 9/8/13

Well, most of the construction work is finished now and for the first time in a few years I am starting to feel that come next season everything will be easily organized. Blogging lately has also taken a back seat especially with my evenings spent harvesting and sowing. For the past few days I've meant to publish a post, then having read through several other blogs I saw that the subjects I was thinking of posting about were already covered by other bloggers. Having taken quite a number of photographs down the plots earlier this week, to my annoyance I had to delete most of them because they were well out of focus and not good enough to publish in a blog post and then today I forgot to take my camera with me to the plots.

First Cobs of the Season Last Week

Over the past 11 days we have had several heavy rainstorms, one with torrential rain and at last after the, as we Brits like to call it "heatwave", the plots are looking refreshed and fruit and veg is developing as it should. A few anomalies I noticed after several weeks of hot dry weather were. The beans of my Runner beans were maturing inside their pods quicker than usual. These had to be picked and discarded. The Runner bean plants were slow to "take" when planted out from pots and later the beans were not setting well. Chard, some lettuce, some Turnips and Swedes were running to seed quickly. Although my Sweetcorn liked the sunny hot conditions, the first cobs only fully fattened up after a good soaking with rain water. Parsnips have been almost none existent this year again only germinating after 2 months and a good soaking with rain water. Inconsistent watering didn't seem to be the cause, just the weather conditions. Anyway things are looking good at the moment and the failures or near failures are worth noting for future reference.