It's a waiting game

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

Mindful of the potential gardening difficulties of a string of trips away from home (visiting relatives, holiday…), I have been more careful than ever to plan my gardening activities this year. Right now, the flurry of sowing and planting has subsided for a while, and I just have to be patient, sit back and watch things grow. This is hard for me: I always want to be doing something!

This is Mark’s Veg Plot, seen earlier this week:

I’ll give you a tour…

Here are the potatoes, (seen Top Left in the photo above), putting on lots of luxuriant foliage now.

The first of the raised beds hosts onions and leeks. The leeks are at the right here, and so tiny still that you probably can’t see them. The sticks are there to deter “diggers”.

Behind the onions is the bed with the PSB, flowering now but shortly to be removed to make room for Runner Beans.

There’s not too much of a hurry yet, because the Runner Beans are only just germinating.

In the third raised bed are my Broad Beans – two rows planted at different times, so that one lot will mature well before the other.

The first row has a good number of flowers on already, so hopefully it won’t be very long before they yield their crop.

On the outer edges of the BB bed are rows of radishes, protected to some extent from the ravages of the Blackbirds by sticks and bits of wood.

Number four bed contains salads – lettuces, beetroot, more radishes and some parsley. The bed is netted to keep birds and animals off.

Seen through the netting, here is my little patch of “Daddy Salad”, nearly ready for picking. It’s a bit more sparsely-populated than I would have wished, because relatively few of the seeds germinated. Still, I can’t really complain since most of the seeds were from old part-used packs.

My fifth raised bed is the one with carrots and parsnips in. I wrote about it / them only a few days ago, so here’s a token photo of the parsnips (taken through their protective Enviromesh):

Whether the asparagus I have is worth growing is a moot point. I have only 3 crowns of it, ones transplanted out of a raised bed I renewed last year, and they are only producing a very meagre crop. I think I may give them one more year and if they don’t improve a lot, ditch them in favour of something else.

The ultimate waiting game is being played here of course:-

My plastic mini-greenhouses are doing just what they are intended for – protecting seedlings, rooted cuttings, over-wintered tender perennials etc, until such time as I feel they will be OK in the fresh air, hopefully in just ten days or a fortnight from now.

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