As the evenings are getting longer, we’ve been lucky enough to spend a couple of evenings after work down on the plot. And what’s made it even better is that the sun has been shining! This means we can get on with all the jobs that have been put on hold from last month because of the freezing weather!
So this week we planted out our ‘Douce Provence’ peas into our raised beds. They’d come on well at home in the cardboard toilet roll holders we planted them in and we just planted them out in these. Steve put some branches/twigs into the bed for the peas to climb up, as he thinks he saw it on Gardeners World or something! I’m not convinced, I think they just need caning, but we’ll see! We planted the peas alongside our other broad beans, so now we have all the legumes in one bed which will be good for our crop rotation next year.
Our tomato, aubergine, pepper and chilli plants are doing really well. We staked a couple of the tomato and chilli plants with canes and ties, as they are getting pretty big and a little wayward, trying to grow towards the light. Hopefully now they’ll be more ‘trained’ to grow straight. We’re going to keep them indoors until the end of April I think and then try and plant them out in the cold frame and see how they get on. We didn’t get any tomatoes, aubergines or chillis last year so fingers crossed we’ll get results this year!
This week we also planted out our chitted potatoes into some patio planters that we’d brought. We put about 4cm of general purpose compost in each planter and put 5 seed potatoes into each one with the shoots facing upwards. We then covered these over with about 6cm compost. The idea is then that when the shoots grow to about 7cm you then add more compost and so on as they grow. This is the first year we’ve tried growing potatoes in this way so fingers crossed!
