A plug for saved seeds - radishes

If you have sufficient resources but insufficient time you can go to the garden centre and buy plug plants.  Radishes, beetroot, whatever takes your fancy have been propagated for you and sold on for you to put straight into your raised bed or wherever you grow your salads.  But if you have time in abundance you can save seed. 

It is a fiddly business winnowing out radish seeds from their long narrow pods, rubbing them in the palm of your hand until they fall into an old pharmacy paper bag - the outcome of many visits with my repeat prescriptions.  But I am glad to say it works.  Last season's seed went down to the allotment in March and now we are eating the first radish of the season, small, round and crunchy.  All that remains is to keep sowing successionally and remember to let the last plants of the year flower like mustard.

I am already eyeing the rogue parsnips that survived the winter and wondering if this too will work.

Frost in April

Frost in April has struck and dotted a black centre at the heart of some of the strawberries that have blossomed too soon.  Once this has happened, it is no good leaving the blossoms to grow in the hope that fruit will come.  The remedy is the drastic one, to pinch them out and toss them on the compost heap.

I do not worry as much now.  I know that behind these early ones are a cluster of other green buds waiting for a sunny day.  Now I inspect my strawberries whilst weeding in the rain.  Positioning them away from frost pockets  would also help.  Ah well, only another three years and time to move them again.

Random Harvest

'Random' say the younger generation and 'cool'.  Cool under its former meaning I understand as soft welcome rain falls on our allotments this Easter Monday.  As for random - that has a meaning all of its own too.

This year, I congratulated myself on planning out a system for all three plots, consulting two organic handbooks and drawing up plans for proper rotation.  However, life in all its physical and spiritual dimensions differs from life on paper.  Kind neighbours - fellow gardeners and allotmenteers at church have given us onion sets, broad beans for spring sowing, and the promise of surplus seed potatoes.  Kind neighbours on the allotment left three packets of cabbage seeds with the invitation to take them having sown all they needed.  Somehow we will find room for them all.

Meanwhile spinach that lay dormant in the homegrown compost is dotted about the plots; sunflower seeds have sprouted where they fell after I left last year's seed head out for the birds, and the malvas I planted, whose young leaves the people of the Near East treat like spinach, are reproducing by the hedge. 

Chance favours the prepared mind, someone famous is reputed to have said.  But  it has been my experience that after all the preparation we need to make space for the generosity of God, through believers and non-believers alike, and through randomness, which we know is also included the plan. 

We are off in the rain after lunch to make ready for the potatoes.

Lettuce rejoice

My winter lettuce are thriving and I am so glad.  I sowed them late last year in our cold greenhouse, along with rocket - which came up like a rocket, was consumed, bloomed and has been taken up.  I pick the odd slug and snail off these little winter gems but on the whole they are hearty and green.

When I think of the cost of fresh salad leaves in the shops I rejoice.  It was worth all the fiddly business of thinning out, picking out weeds that lay dormant in the home grown compost and watering at the end of hot days when the temperatures rose so high that the indoor grapevine began to put on its early leaves.

After these we shall have lollo rosso and then the tomatoes that are germinating in pots on the floor of our lounge and then chilli peppers perhaps.  The key is successional sowing.  No gluts, I hope, but a steady supply of seasonal produce throughout the growing season.  Leave it to others to try exotics - pineapples in hot pits -  lettuce will do me fine.

Bee Aware

I have been sitting beneath our damson tree during this pleasant but unseasonably warm weather listening to the bees.  It is early for bees to be about and the tree which is white with blossoms has a muted air. 

Last Friday I picked up an article in The Independent which suggests that bee populations are crashing across Western Europe because of the use of neonicotinoid pesticides which attack bees' central nervous systems, affecting their homing abilities so that they are more likely to die while away from their nests. 

I could point the moral to this story, but dwelling upon it will only increase my anger and sadness. 

In the meantime, we will continue not to spray.  I will take up the offer of some pulmonaria from a neighbour on the allotment.  Bees like pulmonaria because it blossoms early when there are not many food sources available.  We could propagate more lavender and rosemary.  If we gardeners and allotmenteers made our plots 'bee havens'  and our margins and rough edges places for bumblebees and solitary bees to nest then, God willing, when this still unproven but potentially deadly substance is withdrawn, the bees will recolonise our countryside.