A day of driving rain and wind!

A day of driving wind and heavy rain so no work was done outside on the allotment but there was work to do in preparing the second sowing in the warmth of the Inch nursery of the Japanese vegetables for the pallet competition at Gardening Scotland show at the end of May. Most of the first sowing have germinated well but the shiso and mitsuba have still to appear.

The team had a very quick look round the allotment and saw there has been a lot of growth over the past week with the buds on the pears almost ready to flower and the gooseberries in leaf. Plenty of daffodils being tossed about in the wind, and a lovely crop of sprouting broccoli waiting to be picked but they didn’t hang about!

Hopefully over the weekend, Moira can get the black plastic down over the potato patch where the earlies are to go. This will warm up the soil and we’ll be able to plant the tubers a couple of weeks earlier than our usual date of the Edinburgh Spring holiday weekend.

The broad beans and peas have been sown in pots at home so they can go out as young plants and avoid the problem of the mice eating the seeds if sown straight into the soil.

Jobs for next week: Forking over the remaining beds; Collect more leaf mould; Plant out last year’s strawberry runners; Put netting on the fruit cage