So where was I?

Somehow the summer took over and the garden got relegated to second place. I've still been working in the garden, but mostly just to weed, tidy up and harvest stuff. We have had a remarkable butternut and gemsquash harvest. Great raspberries and blackberries. Nasty apples. A good crop of strawberries.

Today I harvested some lettuce leaves for salad, picked the rest of the gemsquash, almost all of the butternuts, bar a few that were still green, and one giant courgette that got away from me.

My courgettes didn't do well at all this year. They got mildew. Next year I plan to grow more courgettes, start them off earlier and keep them at home in the warm until it's time to go outside.

Today I planted the rest of my Rainbow Chard seedlings so I now have two beds of that. And four rows of Bordeaux spinach. I need to take down the greenhouses and clear up those beds so that they're ready for more lettuce plants.

Plans for next year? More butternuts! They cost 3 euros per kilo in the shops and we love butternut. The gems were great too, but we may have had too many. More courgettes please. The kids want more peas and I want more sweet peas.

Onions and garlic were good this year and so were the shallots. I intend to plant a gooseberry bush and to try again with the red raspberries. I planted two this season and both died. The autumn raspberry (a yellow one) did wonderfully. I'm hoping it will repeat the event next season.

The tomatoes on the balcony did really well, but next year I'll be growing them in the greenhouses I got from the Lidl.

And for this autumn?

• There are three very old blackcurrant bushes that need to be removed from the garden.
• The rhubarb crown that was in the garden when we took it over needs moving, and the new rhubarb plant that I planted this season needs to be cossetted a bit.
• The compost heap needs to be turned.
• The plum tree has lost all it's leaves and needs pruning.
• The strawberries need to be moved to a different bed. The one they are in receives too much shade in summer even though it's sunny in the spring and autumn. I might fill up the space with raspberries. Or plant the buddleias that I bought for that spot.

Before I forget, another success in the last few months was my propagation! I propagated some herbs from cuttings and managed to grow some more rosemary plants, thyme, lavenders and oregano.

Thankfully I had taken a cutting of my purple sage just before the kids stood on the original plant and crushed it so I have a new one of those too!

Finally, I have one word that means a lot to me. Worteldoek. I hate weeding and I don't like getting my feet dirty.

Worteldoek is a permeable plastic membrane that you cut into and plant your plants through. I will be using worteldoek over my entire garden next year.

It keeps the soil clean and warm and keeps the vegetables from lying in the dirt. The slugs don't seem to like it much either.

So here's to worteldoek and the end of the summer.

Flooding, Greenhouses and Rose Arches

Just been up to the allotment to find that some of the localised thunderstorms we have been having localised themselves directly over the Nesserlaan! Gah!

I took some pictures. First here is the flooding:



This area of the garden has consistently flooded. I have two options here as I see it. I can move the sitting area from the other side of the garden down to here and have a squishy sitting area or I can raise the beds by importing a whole lot of sand and soil and improving the drainage. I'm leaning toward the first option purely because it will be simpler to have the chairs and table at the entrance where I can put all my things down as I enter the garden.

Also, I won't be able to leave my mobile phone lying under a pile of branches on the table at the end of the garden and completely forget it, like I did two weeks ago, and only remember that it was lost once it had started raining!

We put up an archway for the thornless blackberries and will be planting a climbing rose, one of the David Austin ones, to keep the blackberries company. My idea was to make a wider path, which sort of stepped sideways into a patio area to cover the flooded area. I could put my potplants in that section too.

Here's the archway:



See the flooding on the pathway too?

I also bought some portable greenhouses that were a special offer at the Lidl. My neighbour spotted them in the Lidl newsletter and called me to take a look. At 25 euros each they are quite sturdy with a metal frame and a plastic cover. They have windows on three sides so you can open the plastic to allow the air to circulate. Inside the plastic is another zipped netting area which forms the window. These are they:



They are placed at right angles to cover the beds of ailing tomatoes and protect them from the wind and storms that are expected the next few days. When they are used properly they will be placed over beds that are the same dimensions as them so that they can easily be moved from one to another.

I think these will be perfect for next year for my tomatoes, sweet peppers and a melon plant. The plastic should keep any blight away from the plants and the whole structure will keep wind damage to a minimum. I'll be able to use the greenhouses to protect early crops from the birds too, like my peas and early lettuces.

Butternut & Gemsquash Update

Thank god for squash! If it wasn't for squash I'd have virtually nothing on my allotment now. We have harvested about 20 Rolet gemsquash so far and have been very pleased with ourselves. It's been years since I had gemsquash! The kids are not convinced that it's a good thing though.

The vines are very vigorous and have spread to cover the entire area that they were planted in and almost completely covered the compost heap. The vines and leaves are prickly so the slugs don't like them, although the slugs do seem to get to the flowers if the flowers are trailing on the soil.

The butternuts were very sad when it rained so much. Valiantly doing their best they had actually put out blossom and produced one fruit each. Two weeks ago I put them over black plastic groundsheet (worteldoek) and my goodness, what a difference. The new flowers that they are producing are the size of my doubled fists and the plants have renewed vigour.

Next year I'll be planting all my squash through groundsheet. The straw that I had put under them seemed close to useless with the amount of rain we've had and the difference in the warmth between the groundsheet and the straw is phenomenal. I am hoping to harvest at least three or four butternuts per plant and I have five plants. That should keep us going a while.

I'd like to try some other pumpkins next year, maybe Futsu. Butternut is always something we'll plant though - perhaps not in the same quantities, but nonetheless, it's a favourite around here.

Tomato Update

Weeks since I updated on the garden, but first I'll do an update on the tomatoes.

The Orange Berry cherry tomatoes are ripening. The few that I had on the allotment ripened first, but have very poor yields due to the excess rain we had (and are still having). But, hey, I got a few and everyone said I wouldn't harvest anything!Each Orange Berry plant (at home in containers) has set about five trusses with about 8 fruits per truss.

They are colouring quickly and today I removed most of the foliage to make them ripen a bit faster. I probably wouldn't do this if they were in a greenhouse or at the allotment, but here at the apartment they look a bit untidy on the balcony so I'd prefer to get them ripened and removed.

The Orange Berry's were sown on 3 March. My opinion is that I might plant a couple next year, but probably not because of yield or ease of growth. They are somewhat sensitive to the salt content in the soil and suffered initially from purpling leaves because of mineral deficiency and then yellowing leaves because of the too much salts from the tapwater. Finally they succumbed to powdery mildew.

This tomato really needs good ventilation and to be watered with rainwater and not tap water.



The Ildi tomatoes, sown on 11 March are doing amazingly well. They have heavy trusses of fruit and very extensive growth. They are the tallest of all the tomatoes I have grown this year. They are very vigorous with strong basal growth and don't seem to be affected by the same issues as the Orange Berry. So far there is no powdery mildew and the leaves haven't shown any signs of purpling. There is some yellowing to the lower leaves, but it's not nearly as pronounced as on the other variety. I'm looking forward to seeing how these trusses of fruit ripen.



The Red Pear is also a moderately vigorous plant, but a poor bearer. Despite having flower trusses that are similar to those of the Ildi it has more limited trusses of around 8 fruits per truss. They are heavy and definitely pear shaped. The plants set about 5 trusses each, and the basal growth was poor. I'll have to wait and see how it tastes before dismissing it as a replanter.

Lieven's F2 (Ida Gold x Whippersnapper) which I got from Patrick is an awesome little tomato! The one I have is determinate and a low growing bush form. It is absolutely covered with tomatoes. So far this one seems a keeper. I hope that it's a reproducible cross!



The Carrot-topped Tomato is another keeper. The plant is also low growing and has set heavily with large tomatoes. The feathery leaves managed extremely well with the high winds we've had this season and the plant suffered virtually no wind burn at all. One of the fruits has windburn but considering the carnage amongst some of my other plants this one is definitely a winner.



The other varieties I have in pots are:

Pineapple
Black Pineapple
Black Prince
Gardener's Delight
Costoluto Fiorentino
Tigerella

The Tigerella has set a few fruits and the Gardener's Delight has several trusses. The others are still a little way behind. The Black Prince and Black Pineapple are very strong plants with very firm stems. Quite different to the bendy-stemmed cherry tomatoes. I don't expect much from the Costoluto Fiorentino as I think it really has to be in a greenhouse to protect it from the elements. The Tigerella and Costoluto Fiorentino were sown on April 15, so almost a month after the cherry tomatoes. I don't have photos of these because it's just started to rain!

Unfortunately all these varieties were on the balcony when we were battered with storms so they suffered quite a bit of wind damage. They're doing their best, but they need more shelter. I had three currant tomatoes from Patrick too, which have been placed at the allotment. Since yesterday they are covered in portable greenhouses so it will be interesting to see if that makes a difference to their production.

Next year I think I will use pots for propagation for all of my tomatoes but I'll use the portable greenhouses set up at the allotment to house the tomatoes in. Any varieties that I grow at home will need to be dwarf or determinate varieties that will fit onto a staging against the wall. I'd love to hear recommendations of any varieties that fit these requirements.

Water misery ....

My garden was underwater for about a week.

In the one half where I have raised beds the water was able to drain away more easily, but the other half is still completely soaked and the earth has started to smell terrible as it rots.

The potatoes were in that area and they became infected with potato blight, so between the smell of the wet ground and the rotten potatoes it's terrible!

The potatoes, cauliflower, kohlrabi and lettuce are a loss. Luckily I took my shallots and onions out before the flooding and, although small, they are adequate. The tomato plants are struggling along. No blight on them, but they look very unhappy - a sickly yellow colour.

Leeks and carrots are ok. Beans and sweetpeas (lathyrus) are drowned.

The only plants that really seem to like the water are the gemsquash (Rolet) which are clambering everywhere. They are more vigorous than the butternut squash which are also struggling to keep up with the water damage. The fruit trees and bushes have done extraordinarily well with a ten kilo harvest from my plum tree and several kilos from the berry bushes. The plums were early and the apples look as though they will also be early.

Today I plan to put black semi-porous sheeting under my butternuts so that they can grow across the sheeting without the leaves rotting. Hopefully it will make a difference.

Since I last wrote lots has happened ...

I dug up our first potatoes, which, though tasty were not quite ready. We may have to take what we can get though because they are suffering from 'holheid'. Not sure what it is in English but the centre of the potatoes has a little hole in it and the potatoes are glassy. Ick. The very small ones are ok. Not entirely convinced about this Novella cultivar. It was a bit tasteless. The potatoes do wash up nicely though and the skin is all but removed with a quick brushing.

The garden got flooded. We had localised floods two weeks ago just before I went to London and most of the garden was underwater. Most of the plants seemed to do ok. The teepees for the peas didn't withstand the wind and the pea plants have since been removed.

The shallots were almost ready so I took them out. We reaped a fair amount of shallots for very little work and they're really tasty, with firm flesh and a purple tinge to the skin. I will definitely repeat the shallot experiment for next year. I purposely planted them close together because I like small bulbs. Nothing worse than half an onion/shallot in the fridge making everything else smell funny.

The cauliflower is forming heads! This is the same cauliflower that shares a bed with the kohlrabi and which I feared had club root. The cabbage in the bed next to it has no club root. I'm baffled. I'll let these ones form their heads and then pull them out and see what their roots are doing. Next year I'll try in a different portion of the plot.

The garlic has a little bit of rust, but nothing on the scale of what I've been reading about.

The strawberries are forming runners. I think we got most of the fruit that we're going to get off the yellow raspberry and the currants are probably lying on the ground now after the horrendous windstorm we've been having all day. I should have harvested them last week. I spent four hours at the allotment and didn't even get half of what I wanted completed.

The apples and plums are hopefully thinning themselves in this wind and the blackberries have put up an amazing framework of stems for next season. All the manure I gave them in spring has obviously worked wonders. I have woven them through a fence I made with wire and poles, and I hope that it holds. I have to work on a system for cutting down the just fruited stems.

How do other people do this? Do you just remember which ones just fruited, or do you mark them some way or another?

On the balcony my tomato plantation is doing wonderfully! My tomatoes are now about 5 ft high and each plant has more than 10 trusses of blossom. The first few trusses on each plant have set fruit and they're looking wonderful. The orange cherry cultivar is very strong indeed and is rampaging all over the place, whereas the gardener's delight seems more restrained. I can see a very big difference now in the planting dates of the seeds. The orange cherry was sown on 3 March and most of the others were sown a week later. Orange cherry has trusses of fruit that are much closer to ripening than the others.

I think for an early crop, and if one has a greenhouse/sheltered area the first week in March is a good time to plant. Of course, it all depends on the weather. Three years ago in March we were under 2 ft of snow.

Patrick gave me a whole lot of tomato plants which are doing pretty well. They've got two sets of blossom on each plant. I used the method of transferring the plants to their final pot/planting out area when they had their first flowers just opening, as per Joy Larkom.

The other side of the balcony, and sadly, still in windowboxes, I have my sweet peppers. I just didn't have enough room/money to get big pots for them. They're rather cramped, but quite pretty and even if they don't bear it will have been a good experiment. They have lots of flowers. I think if I can keep them damp they should bear, but otherwise... oh well. I will know for next time.

The basil is growing nicely, but I learnt something this year - don't plant individual basil seeds, plant a whole 4 inch pot full! I intend to take soft cuttings of my lavender, thyme and rosemary this week to try and establish some new plants.

I had my first sweetpeas from the garden which scented the living room beautifully. The gemsquash and butternut are romping away madly and have filled up their bed/rows between the potatoes. The dwarf bean plantation was augmented with some more plants raised at home. The borlotto didn't come up at all, but the contender did well.

It's time to think of what to plant for winter crops. I will be planting more salad leaves, seeing as all my summer lettuces drowned (and the slugs with them I hope!). I have spinach, swiss chard, autumn planted garlic, overwintering broad beans and peas. Leeks are obviously a must.

I need some more soft fruit bushes. I'm thinking of a gooseberry to replace the one redcurrant that is ill. I tried a wonderful red gooseberry that was just amazing. The current strawberry bed in front of the apple tree will be moved in autumn to be a bed adjacent to the other one with strawberries in and the rest of that area will be for soft fruit.

I'm now working in a flowershop which gives me the capability of buying plants at reduced prices like this chocolate cosmos, which has been calling my name repeatedly this week. They really do smell like chocolate!

So, lots to do, and possibly a development for our family that includes a summer house, 250 m2 of land and a greenhouse, all less than 5 km from our home! Just financial logistics to work on ...

Too too hot

It's 35 degrees out there and we're melting. I visited the allotment this afternoon at lunch time as we have a busy week and it's the only time I could go. I can't help but feel that the water I gave the plants probably all evaporated!

I asked about the redcurrants on my plot and apparently the plants are 17 years old! No wonder their yield is low and they look ill. This winter I'll replace them with other plants. I'm thinking of a gooseberry (kruisbes) and some other raspberries ...

Oh, the garden is so exciting!

So so much stuff happening in the garden.. raspberries starting to ripen - I've had three! Peas in quantities big enough to keep the kids busy for a while, strawberries ripening under their nets. Not enough for much, but they add a nice touch to a fruit salad.

This is a picture of the strawberry nets, with my legs and pink crocs in the background!

The spinach started to make flower buds so I pulled it all up yesterday and we will be having spinach and ricotta cannelloni tomorrow. Mmmmm.

There's enough lettuce to feed an army. The beans are flowering away, the climbing beans are climbing, some nasturtiums are flowering.

The butternut plants have recovered from their chill and have gone nice and green and have started doing a mile a minute growing. The tomatoes that I planted first out still look a bit sickly, but the ones subsequent to those are doing fine. It's a bit of a gamble with those tomatoes anyway as there is usually tomato blight at the allotments, which is why I have 24 tomato plants in pots on my balcony!

But most exciting of all, my gemsquash plants have flowers and one has a baby gemsquash! That's the picture at the top! I am so excited I can barely speak! If all we get is gemsquash from the allotment it will be worth it.

Next year I am definitely doing more pea growing, more strawberries and concentrating on getting a bigger and better harvest from the soft fruit. I should have a cracker raspberry and blackberry harvest judging by the amount of canes they've put up this season so far, but I'm completely unsure of how to prune the red and blackcurrants. The bushes look a bit elderly and one of them is completely dead in the centre.

The redcurrants in the picture above are from the younger plant. The older plant has tiny fruit and yellowed leaves.


More photos here.

Straw for Strawberries

Today we went and bought straw for the strawberries, pvc piping (like the kind used for electrical cabling) and netting.

I've erected one hooped cover for one garden bed (ironically, for the cauliflowers which still have an undetermined fate, but whom the ducks seem to think are extremely tasty), and covered it with netting. It looks really professional and quite tidy too. I'll take some photos and update tomorrow.

The pvc pipes cost 89c each and I'll be going back tomorrow or Wednesday and getting enough to do all the beds. I think it's the only sensible way to keep the ducks out of my plants!

The straw comes in 5 kg compressed vacuum sealed bags for about 5 euros a bag. You can buy uncompressed bales, but they're much bigger and I'd need to have the car commercially cleaned to get rid of all the dust!

I used one five kg bale to do both strawberry beds and give each squash and courgette plant a nice warm base. The gemsquash look like they grew about 5 inches since yesterday! The other bale is waiting to replenish the berries later in the season.

Vertine has some nice photos of all the 'protection' methods used on her allotment site to keep the birds out of the berries.

Today I'll be sowing some more dwarf beans here at home in 3 inch pots, transplanting some of my tomatoes to bigger pots. The ones that I showed you a week or so ago now have at least two flower trusses showing.

The difference in growth after they are transplanted to their final growing area is just incredible! The ones at the allotment are also looking pretty good.

Finally, my garlic looks as though it might be ready to harvest in about 2 weeks.

Club root on kohlrabi

So so disappointed ... I had a look at my kohlrabi this morning and something prompted me to pull two up. Sad to say that they seem heavily afflicted with clubroot. I didn't lime before planting and I have no idea what the gardener before me planted in the area that is now occupied by my cauliflower, cabbage and kohlrabi.

Apparently he planted brassicas. It seems I may have also shot myself in the foot by accepting seedlings from a fellow gardener - she may not have started hers off in sterile potting compost and the fungus could have been present even before they reached my garden.

You can see more pictures of the afflicted roots here.

Tomorrow I have the wonderful task of either going back and pulling out all of my brassicas to try and contain the spread or just leaving them alone and hoping for the best for the rest of this season.

Oh, and the three trays of broccoli and cauliflower seedlings I have here waiting to go in the ground? I guess they'll be ... not.

In the autumn I can heavily lime the brassica area, which will be a different patch in my rotation and then try again next year.

Here's another useful factsheet. And in case you wanted to know, clubroot is called 'knolvoet' in Dutch.

Not for all the Lovage in the world ...

Lovage or maggikruid in Dutch is a rather unassuming plant when you see it in the garden centre. They have it in these tiny pots and it looks like it would quite happily stay the same size forever. What an untruth!

Lovage tries to take over the world!

I didn't plant ours myself. It conveniently came up all on it's own, even though I had intended to buy one after reading that it's a 'beneficial to everything' companion plant, much like borage.

When the lovage started coming up in the spring I thought maybe we had something exciting, like asparagus. I asked someone and they told me what it was and I left it alone.

Until today that is, where I ruthlessly pulled it all up. Judging by how fast the little shoots have forced themselves up through the ground I'm sure it will be just as big in no time at all. It grows to 2 metres high!

It has an interesting smell, very clean and celery like. Brad wasn't so keen - he said it stinks!

I also paid Sebastian 2 euros to weed the onion bed and carry the weeds to the compost bin. He had to do it without complaining in order to get paid. And he did! I also trimmed the dead wood out of the black and redcurrant bushes, and we removed some growth from the plum tree which appeared infected with a virus of some kind. Then we covered the strawberries with a net to save the first strawberry from the birds. We laid some slug traps using milk.

My onions and garlic are starting to yellow. I can't believe it's time already, is it?

I am still unsure whether these are black or redcurrants ...

More May photos here.

The tomato plantation

My tomatoes seem fine. I transplanted six of the Orange Berry into pots and their leaves immediately stopped turning downwards. I think that the downward turning leaf problem was definitely a signal that they didn't like being root bound, not that they were suffering some heinous sort of wilt. So physiological and not disease.

The ones with the brown spots on the leaves are doing quite fine in isolation and now that they are out of the rain has stopped the leaves have stopped spotting up.

The six other Orange Berry absolutely have to be transplanted to the garden. I'm thinking of doing that tomorrow and covering them with fleece to keep them warm. The balcony is a good deal warmer than the allotment site as we don't get the wind directly off the open polder here.

Patrick came over yesterday bearing bounteous quantities of tomatoes! In return he took only one Red Pear. I hope it bears well for him!

My tomato collection has been swelled with the following (thanks Patrick!):

Pineapple
Black Pineapple
Black Prince
Silvery Fir Tree
Matt’s Wild Cherry
Sugar Cherry Currant
F2 Hybrid, Ida Gold x Whippersnapper

You can read more about these on Patrick's blog entry about them

Added to my:

Gardener's Delight
Costoluto Fiorentino
Red Pear
Ildi
Orange Berry
Tigerella

(No affiliation with any of the suppliers listed above, I just used the first that came up with a usable link.)

Of the tomatoes Patrick gave me I'll keep all but the currant tomatoes here on my balcony, or at the allotment in pots. The others that I have in trays will be divided between the garden and the balcony. The heirloom varieties will need bigger pots - I'm thinking 40 cm and upwards.

As for the garden itself. I was up there twice yesterday and didn't do much except look. It's wet. Very wet.

Next week there is dry weather forecast so I'm going to use the medieval tool that the association owns to earth up my potatoes. It's sort of like a v-shaped spade on a long pole that you pull between the rows and it throws up earth on either side of itself.

I'm very excited to see that my Contender dwarf beans have flowered and now have baby beans on them. Likewise the peas are at a stage where we can eat a few peas every time we visit the garden. I'm desperate for the space currently hosting the potatoes, onions, garlic and shallots. Roll on June/July!

You can see some pictures from the garden here.

Spots on Tomatoes and Spots on Bugs

I haven't been to the garden this weekend yet, so no nice pictures to show you unless you're interested in 7 year olds playing football! No?

I did some research because my tomatoes, healthy up until yesterday, suddenly developed little spots on some of the leaves. I found a wonderful website entitled the 'Tomato Problem Solver'. Perfect!

The other website I found which I thought I should bring to your attention is the Harlequin Ladybird Survey website for the UK. We have Harlequins here in Holland and I don't like them much. Nothing at all like a Harlequin Romance, these bugs actually eat other native ladybirds!

I've seen some 7-spot ladybirds, but recently the Harlequins have been more prevalent. Larvae of both sorts of bugs is peculiar looking! Who would have thought a ladybird came out of such an evil-looking larva?

My tomato problem seems to be bacterial speck, or Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato, thanks to all the rain we've been having. I've removed the affected leaves and isolated the plants. Let's hope it doesn't spread.

Tomorrow I'll be in the garden making sure the slugs didn't eat absolutely everything that's growing.

What the garden did on vacation

Came back from vacation and first thing on Saturday we were at the allotment. The committee had made sure my garden was watered and I was amazed to see how everything grew while we were gone! The weeds grew too!

Some new photos to show you what I mean.

A beautiful butterhead lettuce. This one was a seedling from the garden centre.



We ate one just like it for supper tonight with a chilli vinaigrette, chopped tomato, feta cheese and sliced carrot. Oh, and the best kebabs ever! Marinated in a ginger, garlic, maple syrup and vinegar marinade. Mmmmm...

One of the Salad Bowl lettuces planned for dinner tomorrow. This lot was sown indoors back on the 3rd March.



First pea pods, sown indoors on 3 March. Don't they look just like peas in a pod?



A cauliflower surrounded by some purple kohlrabi. The idea is to harvest the kohlrabi as golf ball sized fruit and then pull them out, leaving the cauliflowers the rest of the space.

These cauliflower are remarkable because they were eaten almost down to the ground by the ducks before I made my cunning chicken wire enclosure for them! They've recovered wonderfully. The chicken wire is off and they now have pirate flags protecting them from errant fowl. I'm hoping the pirates on the bunting will prove even more chillingly frightening to the ducks. Pity you can't threaten ducks with walking the plank.

The caulis were from the garden centre and the kohlrabi from my neighbour. Don't they look beautiful together?



Blackberries in bloom. I'm thinking ... JAM!



A procession of cows on the polder:



I wonder what they were doing? Do you think one said 'follow me' and the rest did? Maybe the two behind have co-dependent personalities. Maybe the one in front is a dictator. Psychology among cows... I'm sure someone's studied it.

I also replanted some tomatoes to 10 cm pots, bought some compost to replant the rest, potted on some calabrese (broccoli), planted more lettuce in a tray, weeded my entire plot, tried out the new sprinkler, and then tidied up everything and brought it home because tomorro, after 45 days of drought, it's going to rain!

34 days and counting ...

Without rain, that is! I can't believe it. The newspaper headlines today were full of how it's not quite a drought. In a place where it usually rains every day I think this qualifies as a drought!

I'm especially concerned because I'm on vacation this week. I've asked some of the other gardeners to look after my plot and water my plants, but there's always the fear of returning to find everything dead and dying.

Yesterday I planted out loads of squash plants, more sweet pea seedlings and transplanted lettuces. Cross fingers they are still alive when I return.

Oh, and the pea plants and strawberry plants are flowering!!

Making Newspaper Pots

Just a quick note here to say that I found a wonderful resource for making newspaper pots! I've made a few to hold my courgette seedlings (when they come up) and I'll definitely be using these for beans and peas in the future.

I also ask my local florist to keep all their 10 cm plastic pots for me. They buy plants in bulk and re-pot them and usually just throw away the pots.

This way I get them for free and in return I bake something nice for the florist as a gift. It works pretty well as an exchange :)

How to Make Newspaper Pots

Saturday in the garden

Everything is growing so beautifully, but it hasn't rained. That means lots of watering.

Today I quickly visited the allotment after the kids' football to water everything and harvest my first bit of rhubarb for a cake.

Had the camera with us from football so took some pictures.

The apple tree in blossom:

The chives are blossoming:

The shallot bed, with carrots and marigolds:

The onion bed, look how much they grew since last time:

Berry blossom, I think this is a white currant:

A red salad bowl lettuce. These are sown in rows of alternating red and green. When they're fully grown they should look fab! Unless we eat them before then:

Have a look here for other photos, including some fantastic Dutch Irises on someone else's plot.

I'm disappointed in my spinach. It's come up all patchy so I'm going to transplant it to even the rows out a bit.

I sowed it a bit heavy handed in places, now I know for next time to drop pinches of the seed instead of just throwing it randomly down a drill! I far prefer planting in egg trays than planting in the open ground - I seem to get much better results that way.

At home my tomatoes are growing fantastically well. They have been outdoors on the balcony for the last week and even though our temperatures have dropped to 3 or 4C the last few nights they seem ok. The squash are also outside on the balcony and seem to be doing alright. I don't mind if their growth gets a bit retarded as they are a bit ahead of themselves. Next year I will know to sow my seeds closer to the middle of May.

I planted basil plants, grown from seed, out into the windowboxes and repotted the parsley and oregano that were in there. A bit of fresh soil should make all the difference.

In the propagator I have a few more types of tomatoes that have all germinated and need potting on, a couple of different kinds of basil, broccoli, chives and cauliflowers. I also planted two courgettes - Eight Ball and Astia. There are winter leeks on the windowsill waiting to be planted outside.

Rain is forecast for this week which will hopefully give the potatoes something to make them grow!

Ok, so who turned the sun on?

It's flipping hot! I could even say 'it's FRIKKIN' hot!' I got so sunburnt today. First window washing, then car washing, then the whole afternoon in the allotment.

We spent most of yesterday morning there, before rushing back to catch the Grand Prix qualifying - husband is a fan.

Today I was there from 1 - 5 pm. The kids sat in their tent and read books, dug a bit in the dirt, fed grass to the chickens, got in the chicken run with the chickens ... in short... all those things kids get to do outside that they can't do in an apartment block. I love it!

Yesterday most of the time was taken up with chatting, having coffee with some other gardeners, getting some spare seedlings - spitskool, kohlrabi and kropsla. I planted them out yesterday but my visit today showed that the kropsla were very offended by the heat and today they were very wilted. I think one or two might die.

No such luck with the kohlrabi.

I'll let you in on a secret. I really don't like kohlrabi, but the lady who gave them to me was so nice, and I want to see what they look like when they grow and I had a spot to put them in so I took them. Ok, so the real reason I have them is because I just can't say no!

I planted out 12 Ostara strawberry plants yesterday and today I planted more sweet peas v. Old Spice - they finally came through after about four weeks! I now have Old Spice and Bijou on either side of a fence constructed of canes and chicken wire.

More sweet peas came out of their layers of damp kitchen paper today and went into trays. This variant is Candyman and it is a bright pink. I'll erect another screen for those in a different place. The sweet peas are for cutting. They don't seem that popular in the allotments here. I wonder why?

Other seed sowing happened today. The sweetcorn I had growing in pots was planted out and I also sowed seeds directly into the ground. I am making two windbreaks of corn, and my runner beans (Armstrong) will be left to clamber in the corn.

The runner beans and dwarf beans that I have here at home are becoming rather leggy but I'll keep them here a while longer. I'm still nervous that there might be a late frost.

I planted out two trays of Salad Bowl lettuce and I'm really pleased with the patterns I've made. I alternated rows of red and green lettuce - very pretty! The other three plants that were over went into the strawberry bed. They should be cut before the strawberries spread to fill the bed.

I also planted two more rows of carrots. I'm getting into this 'potager' look and sowing rows of plants in pretty patterns. The carrots form two sides of a square and the sweetcorn the other two. Hopefully the corn will shade the middle of the square so that I can plant things that are not that tolerant of heat in the middle.

My makeshift cover from chicken wire for the cauliflowers has worked really well, no more ducks eating them, but the peas are still being eaten by a mystery beast. It just nibbles the edges of the leaves? Bit like a caterpillar chomping, but I can't see any?

Spinach is through, need transplanting, carrots are through and need thinning, lettuces are through and ready to transplant. The apple tree is blossoming!

At home I planted chives; lemon basil; basil minette; gardener's delight, tigerella and costaluto florentino tomatoes (heirloom beef steak tomato) in trays.

I think I need to stop with the tomatoes now as each of those trays will give me 6 plants and I already have 18 cherry tomato plants already potted up.

Tomato addiction, anyone?

Oh, I want a courgette plant, but this year I will be lazy and buy one (and some aubergines) from the garden centre rather than starting my own from seed.

The flowers I planted in trays last weekend are through and I have to transplant them to modules.

I think it was a pretty successful weekend's gardening but I just wish it would rain! It hasn't rained for weeks now. The gardeners at the allotment allayed my fears of the canal running out of water. Apparently it has never happened before, except one year when there was a fault further up, so my plants won't die from lack of water.

It was so hot that the ponies were in the sloot (canal)!

I wanted to join them.

Overwhelmed in the allotment

We just finished watching some episodes of Beyond River Cottage where Hugh leaves his smallholding of 3 - 4 acres to take over a proper farm of about 40 acres. It's a wonderful series, just like River Cottage was, and the kids even sat still and watched for a couple of hours with us.

Sebastian was engrossed in the part where the cows were having their gynae exams to see if they were in calf or not, and Joe was particularly interested in the mortality of various of the beasts which were slaughtered and then eaten.

We have big mortality issues with him at the moment, ever since we visited the old age home for Palmpasen. He's been waking up at night crying and has become extremely concerned that we might age and die overnight. Poor baby. There's no real remedy except to be matter-of-fact and wait for him to come to terms with it.

I guess part of the reason it was such a shock for him is that he has never really seen a very elderly or elderly and infirm person up close. One of the disadvantages to having no family locally.

Moving on swiftly from imaginary scenes of alzheimers, dementia and invalidity ...

In the series that we're watching now Hugh says that when he moved from River Cottage to the new farm the idea of having so much extra space and responsibility was daunting. I can understand.

We recently got the allotment next to ours so we have a full sized, 110 m2 garden now instead of the 50 m2 we had before. I had everything planned out perfectly for the first half and we had laid out our beds and pathways and planned what we intended to grow.

Now that the second half is added in, I feel all at sea. I have all this space and nothing to plant in it. If I had known I had it I would have started more vegetables for longer term growth, like broccoli, a lot earlier. As it is, I concentrated on short, quick growing crops that would utilise the space that I had to the maximum. Suddenly there is so much more potential.

Here's a very rough plan (not to scale) of the allotment. Some of the plants are already in situ, others are waiting patiently on the windowsill until after Ijsheiligen. In the meantime they get shifted outdoors in the daytime and back inside at night.

Some of these crops will be in the ground through winter, like the parsnips.

Areas that currently house peas, lettuce, onions and garlic wll be planted with winter crops like broccoli, winter spinach, carrots and chinese greens.

Amazing when you look at the plan and realise that the parsnips will only be eaten in nine months time!

The sweetcorn (maize) and sweet peas will hopefully provide some kind of windbreak for the beans, which seem to be very tender to strong winds. Being on the polder we get a lot of those and they blow in both directions across our allotment.

The raised bed system that we're trying to use requires a lot of investment at first in the form of the wood that we need to use for the borders. As a result we're doing it gradually. I'd prefer to spend money on plants rather than on wooden borders, but the system has so many advantages, not least the lack of muddy feet! I didn't realise quite how comfortable the pathways were until I had to kneel in the dirt to plant the cauliflowers and leeks as our bedding system hasn't been implemented on that side yet.

The pathways between the beds are currently woodchips, because that was what we had at the allotment when we were laying out the paths. I'm going to search out some straw to use for the remainder. The advantage of both woodchips and straw is that it can just be cultivated into the ground or swept up and added to the compost heap when it's time for a refresh.

Our table and chairs are at the site now, and we've discovered that the paving stones are far from level! A plan will have to be made with sand and a spirit level to try and get them flat. Otherwise all those meals we intend to eat there will have to be eaten with one hand holding the table steady!

So, who's coming to our first bbq at the allotment? We can pick our salad fresh from the garden!

Plum Blossom & Easter Bunnies

Plum blossom

Yesterday we visited the garden and found that the Easter bunny had been!

I planted the leeks out into the trenches I'd prepared the day before. I intend to plant rocket or to plant out my lettuce seedlings between the leeks. The lettuces have come up in droves so as soon as they develop a second set of leaves I'll transplant some of them to other spots.

There definitely seem to be some kind of carrot-like thing growing. Just waiting for the next leaves so I can be certain. My spinach is also through.

Onions and garlic are about 2 inches high now and the strawberry crowns are developing beautifully.

At home I transplanted peppers and tomatoes into 10 cm pots. I also started some leeks, maize and sunflower seeds on the windowsill. The leeks are in a discarded biscuit container and the maize and sunflower seeds are in paper cups.

I'm disappointed with the germination rate of my sweet peas. Despite soaking them between sheets of kitchen towel until they sprouted and then planting them, I only have about 11 plants from two packs of seed.

The varieties I used were Old Spice and Bijou (a low growing variety). Now I'm trying again with a variety called Candyman which yields pink blossom and the remainder of the Bijou seed.

The paper cups tip for bigger seeds was one I picked up from a book and I'm so glad I did as paper/plastic cups are *much* cheaper than buying black plastic pots.

An even better tip - if you have a florist you visit frequently ask them to keep the black plastic pots from the plants that they buy to re-pot - saves a fortune!