Harvest Monday - rain, rain go away...

Wow it's so rainy here at the moment. I had an allotment session yesterday before the deluge started in earnest, managing to plant out my onion sets (variety Sturon) and 2nd early potatoes, variety Orla. This is a new variety for me as the catalogue had run out of my usual. I'm also trying a new maincrop, which I'll plant whenever the rain decides to stop. Over the last couple of weeks I've been harvesting loads of leeks (but didn't get any pics) and cleared them all from one bed, in readiness for the maincrop potatoes.

In the lean-to greenhouse at home I cut all the winter purslane leaves from one pot, to encourage some fresh growth from below. It's quite an easy way of harvesting too, grabbing a handful and cutting through the lot, rather than picking off individual leaves. These mainly went into a pesto, made with toasted cashews plus some rocket leaves from Eves Hill Veg Co where I volunteer, as these particular rocket plants had started to bolt. They still had a nice soft texture though. Some rocket from the lean-to here at home went on top of a potato-pizza that Jan made...that was a goood pizza.

I've also continued to harvest corn salad / lambs lettuce from the allotment. I meant to get some more yesterday but forgot, making a quick getaway from the cold rain. 

A few days ago it was actually sunny, which handily coincided with a free day for me, so I had a good session sowing broad bean seeds - I dib the holes first and then go along popping one seed in each hole, then use a rake to gently cover the rows. Before I dibbed the holes, I also raked the whole bed, to kill off any weed seeds germinating in or just below the soil surface. The dibber is actually just the handle of an old fork which snapped a few years back.

After sowing the beans, I then made two seed drills inbetween the three bean rows, for parsnips with radishes. I've used this method before - the radishes grow quickly, and are then harvested whilst the slow parsnips germinate. The broad beans do their thing too and are cleared (leaving the roots in the soil to feed the parsnips) before the parsnips really need to get going. It usually works except last year I had zero parsnips germinate, which may have been a dodgy pack, even though it was fresh seed. I water along the seed drill first, then sow the seeds. It was useful for the papery parsnip seeds to stick to the wet soil, as it was a bit windy and they tend to get blown around otherwise. I expect the ones which got blown away will germinate and grow better than the ones I properly sowed!

I'm still volunteering at Eves Hill Veg Co (community market garden) most Wednesday's, there's a good crew of us at the moment. Last Saturday was also the monthly open day, where a wider group of people tend to come along and help / have a look around. It was particularly special this week as two heavy horses were on site to help shallow-plough the field-scale beds. Whilst the aim of the market garden is to try and disturb the soil as little as possible, it's quite difficult to prepare the long beds otherwise. I think everyone enjoyed seeing the working horses too, there's a real skill in handling them. These two particular horses are usually helping to remove logs felled within woodland, so they did really well getting the hang of it quite quickly.

Oh I forgot, I've also potted-on all my tomatoes, peppers and aubergines. They're now in the lean-to greenhouse where the light is much better than indoors. I've protected them from the worst of the cold with bubble wrap on the shelf and along the adjacent windows. I'll probably sow some more things this week, (it is April after all, I think, ha). But most of the seed sowing will start later in April / May.

Thanks for reading, I'm linking in as usual with Harvest Monday kindly hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.