Brassicas Bees & Aphids

Bees and other native pollinating insects tend to prefer flat open flowers where the nectar can be easily reached of which the bright yellow flowers of cabbages, kales and mustard are a fine example. 

All these winter staples have now bolted in my potager and as well as the leaves, we've eaten plenty of the flower spears of the various kales before they opened, after all they are pretty much the same as sprouting broccoli, although not quite as nice to eat. But now the flowers have opened and the plants are buzzing with bees.

Toughening Up the Tomatoes

This week the bulk of the one-off sowing has now been done for the spring/early summer and my focus has switched to hardening off the indoor sown tender plants such as tomatoes, aubergines, chillies, peppers, melons, cucumbers and pumpkins. They will not survive a frost and will suffer if temperatures fall below about four or five degrees, but even if the temperature is a little warmer than that, the plants will stall and stagnate at anything below about ten degrees, day or night.

So at the moment I'm doing the twice daily shuffle - as soon as it hits ten outside (I have two thermometers, one on the covered terrace and one under a Stevenson screen in the open) I move everything outside. The plants need to get used to not only sun and rain, but breezes too. If it is too windy they'll stay inside; the roots need to be strong enough to stop the plant rocking in the ground. The spot I choose for hardening off is under the shelter of a rose covered pergola, so the sunlight is dappled and not too intense. The plan is to spend around two to three weeks getting the young plants fit to move out into the ground by the start of May. Assuming the weather is mild enough.

This year I finally cracked and invested a whole thirty Euros in a 'blow-away' greenhouse, a plastic affair so named by gardeners because of their tendency to disappear next door at the slightest puff of wind! The thermal qualities are not great, but are a nice middle road between the house at 16 degrees overnight and fully outdoors which will be too cold at four or five.

Timing is very much a juggling act and entirely weather dependent. The plants will stall or die if they are not ready when transplanted to the big wide world, but equally they'll suffer if left in small pots for too long. In cold and wet springs (2013 was dire) I've ended up potting on all my tender stuff and filling the living room with plants! 

The bulk of my other jobs for this week are pricking out and potting on. I have pots of various varieties of broccoli and calabrese that are just starting to show their first set of true leaves, plus two sorts of Brussels sprouts. of which Red Ball has never yet managed to produce edible sprouts but the colour is just so enticing! 

And then there are the melons and cucumbers; the latter are a staple (I have a fabulous recipe for cucumber curry - yes, really!) and waking up to the scent of a just ripe melon wafting in from the garden in late summer is just sensational.

But from next week I think planting out of some hardy veggies will be starting in anger, but at least almost all the beds are now ready with their straw duvets. More on that soon.

The Rhythm of Lettuces and Jobs for the Week - mid April

This week brings an end to the early spring sowing frenzy with only courgettes, leaf beet and chard plus a range of haricot beans on the list, but that doesn't mean it is going to be an easy week by any stretch. Once I've added to the sowing list all the seeds that get sown over and over again throughout the growing season - lettuces, beetroot, coriander, turnips, radishes - and then all the previously sown seeds that will need pricking out or potting on - cabbages, kohlrabi, lettuces and a range of flowers it is going to be a busy week.

Add into the mix the need to cut the grass and do the weeding for a number of clients and I'm just not sure whether we'll be able to take advantage of the last week of the ski season up at Piau Engaly. They had an enticing 30cm of fresh snow last weekend, so it is a real temptation in what has been a dreadful snow season. Summer drought down here means poor plant growth and endless watering, but in the mountains poor winter snow levels are bad both for the vital winter sports industry, and for filling the rivers and reservoirs as the snow melts, compounding any summer drought.

I mentioned sowing and pricking out lettuces and want to explain why I don't just direct sow once the ground has warmed up, especially as I reckon to sow lettuces about every fourteen days or so. The reasons are simple. Although now very much more under control, I do have a large number of slugs in my vegetable garden. Night patrols to collect and dispose of these pests would often yield over 500 in one evening, each evening from late March until June. Now that we have a better slug/predator balance in the garden - slow worms, glow worms, toads, newts, hedgehogs and many predatory beetles now share the space with us - I am happier to let nature deal with the problem. 

However, expecting tasty lettuce seedlings to survive is just foolish!

Lettuce falls into a nice three stage rhythm. Firstly in mid-February I sow into a seed tray, usually three varieties in three rows. 

These should germinate and be ready to prick out once they have formed the first set of true leaves after ten days to a fortnight. I prick these out, normally three to five plants to a pot which frees up the tray (cleaned and filled with fresh compost) for the next sowing. 

About a fortnight later the potted on plants should be ready to be planted out into the ground; the entire potful going out into one pot. The seed tray plants should be ready for potting on at the same time and I fall neatly into the pattern of planting out, potting on and sowing new seeds once every two weeks or so up until about mid September when the last batch of winter hardy lettuces are sown, ready for planting out in early October. These will go into a space which can be easily covered by a small tunnel, in which I will also keep a supply of radish, turnips, beetroot and coriander going. Well, that's the plan!

The lettuces for this year are - 
Red Salad Bowl
Freckles
Little Gem
Rocket (not really a lettuce, I know!)
Arctic King
Rouge d'Hiver

If I come across some other interesting seeds I may supplement this list. I am a sucker for seed buying.

An Introduction to My Garden

When we arrived on our field I had not anticipated that a decade on, the garden would still really be rather more field than garden. 

Part of this is deliberate - a large swathe of the 'grass' only gets cut once a year allowing the wildflowers a chance to flower and set seed.

 


This benefits the whole local ecosystem and is intended to increase, or at least stop the decline, in biodiversity. That's the theory, anyway. The moles certainly seem happy!