The Fixed Bed Allotment Blog: Photo Journal

I'm not very good at integrating photographs with this journal. It's just that, nowadays, I'm much more interested in words than pictures.

However, successive blocks of nothing but text can be a bit turgid I realize. So I have persuaded my wife (who is interested in photography) to take a series of shots once a month. So I hope to include a monthly picture diary of the allotment's progress.

We took these pictures more than a week ago, but it has taken me till then to work out how to transfer them on my AppleMac from iphotos where Mrs Spud kindly put them, to somewhere where I can transfer them into the blog. I am a bit of a technophobe, and every setback finds me closing the computer and deciding to try again tomorrow.

The seedlings in the greenhouse

The red pots in the middle show some healthily growing calabrese. Unfortunately a hard frost 2 days later did for them, even underneath a double layer of fleece. Similarly with the Igloo cauliflowers, in the modules top left.

I am still learning what can stand the cold and what can't, and of course, I am making mistakes. Intuitively, I would expect lettuces, which cannot withstand the winter cold as mature plants, to suffer from frost more readily then cauliflowers, which can. However the opposite seems to be the case with seedlings. The young brassicas were nipped off, whereas the young lettuces (in green tray to the right) shrugged off the cold.

This strange picture shows my potatoes growing in sacks in the greenhouse. They are growing so fast that I have to cover the shoots with soil almost daily.

The Field Bean Bed - sown in November - is now looking good.

Some spring onions, sowed in the autumn (variety white lisbon hardy) are supplementing spring salads. This bed also hosted the leeks. The board just visible at the top of the picture I stepped on while harvesting the last of the leeks. (I am diligent about not treading on and compacting the soil.)

Here are some lettuces that I have planted out in a brassica bed. These lettuces were sown in the autumn and have overwintered outside without protection (variety Winter Gem). I intend to plant out early cabbages and cauliflowers in between. By the time the brassicas need the space in early summer, the lettuces will have been eaten.

My pea bed consists of 2 temporary lengths of netting with a temporary path between.

My first early peas (variety Meteor). If they need to, they can hold onto the netting. However first earlies make quite sturdy plants, which often manage to survive without supports. These were started off (by soaking and sprouting) on 1st March, and planted out late March. My neighbour keeps cursing, and triumphantly trapping, mice which love to eat the pea seed he sowed directly in the soil. By starting mine off indoors, I avoid this problem. The metal grid leaning against the netting is to protect against the other menace when growing peas, birds, which love to eat the tender young shoots.