Looking Back: Year of Flowers!

Last year I set myself two new challenges: to start a cut flower patch, and to grow some cauliflowers.

I'm pleased to report that my late summer cauliflowers were pretty successful, although varying in size. These 'Autumn Giant' caulis from Real Seeds were sown in April and planted out in May, and by mid-August we were enjoying them. The slugs enjoyed them quite a lot as well... But I'm calling it a success and we'll hope to grow even more of them this year. I've sown them earlier this spring, to give them more time to get nice and big...

The spring cauliflowers still on the plot now (variety 'Aalsmeer') are not doing quite so well; they haven't really gotten big enough, a few have disappeared completely, and I'm not very hopeful they'll provide us much worth eating. But still, I think I'll put that down to 'probably planted out a bit late' and give them another try; anything that crops in early spring is worth striving for as it can be a lean time in the veg garden.

The cut flowers were a roaring success, brightened up the plot no end and brought more beneficial insects to our plot than ever before, and they'll certainly be a permanent feature from now on! We brought home flowers once or twice a week, most weeks from May through to October - and we won a first at the allotment show with them too!

Here are eight things I learned about growing cutting flowers:

1) Deadheading (and harvesting the flowers too for that matter) takes aaaages.

2) We didn't provide proper support for our flowers, but it turned out we didn't really need to. As it's a small patch and the flowers were grown close together, they generally supported each other. They did sprawl out across paths on the outside of the patch, but a simple bamboo-cane fence round the perimeter was enough. I'll put this in from the beginning this year.

3) I'm not very good at arranging flowers. (I'm not letting this stop me.)

4) It's hard to know where to cut the flowers sometimes; for example cornflowers are very branching - should I cut at the first branch, which doesn't leave me a very long stem? or should I cut a whole branching arm from the plant?

5) Cosmos are not actually that great in the vase, with their scrawny, twisting stems. But they're so good on the plot - attracting bees until well into the autumn - that I'll keep growing them anyway. Corncockle, with short stems and a short vase life, weren't terribly useful either, but again the bees loved them so I might grow one token plant...

5.5) Sweet peas are amazing.

6) Some others weren't so good in the vase either but I know it's because I haven't got the knack yet of conditioning them properly. Cerinthe was the worst - absolutely lovely, but always the first to wilt. Apparently you're supposed to dip the stems in boiling water, which frankly just seems wrong... But this year I'll give it a go.

7) Mixed seeds are never a good mix. My 'mixed' scabiosa were all white, my 'mixed' snapdragons were 90% pink, and my 'mixed' salvia viridis were 90% purple. Just buy the individual colours you want to grow.

8) It's SO worth it. Give up just a few square metres of your plot for some flowers and see for yourself.

Unfortunately I somehow missed out on sowing flowers last autumn for an early show this spring (except for some October-sown sweet peas), so I'm a step behind with my flowers this year, but nevertheless I've invested in a few new varieties to try and I'm looking forward to seeing them brightening up the plot again soon :-)

In addition to the annuals and biennials I plan to sow, I've got a few other flowers coming up...

Our local nursery, Aylett Nurseries, is a bit of a dahlia specialist and has a dahlia show every September. I went along for the first time last year and, though I find some dahlias a bit too much, was wowed by the bright colours and the huge variety...

So I've invested in a single 'Finchcocks' dahlia tuber (pictured above, bottom right), just to see how I go with it... Actually it's not my first dahlia; I have a compact, dark-leaved 'Mystic Illusion' in a pot. As you probably know by now, I'm really not one for fiddling about with plants with complex needs, so there was no digging up tubers when winter came; I just bunged the pot in the summer house and hoped for the best...

Anyway, today I potted up my new tuber in some compost in the summer house to start sprouting. I doubt this one will get any coddling either; I may just mulch it in winter and see how it does by itself.

I bought a verbena bonariensis 'Lollipop' plant last summer just because the butterflies and bees seem to love it so much, and I adore that deep purple glow - but this could be a good cutting flower too, and it's now planted out by the side of our pond on the allotment. I heard they self-seed easily, so I crumbled some of the seed heads over a tray of compost last autumn, stuck it at the back of the greenhouse, and whaddaya know...

I can't possibly use all of these seedlings, but I pricked some out and potted them up today so that now I can enjoy them in the garden as well as at the allotment - and so can the bees :-)

Busy, busy!

Winter and early spring are great times for gardeners to do all sorts of non-growing jobs, like developing new areas and working on paths or buildings. I had a long list of these this year, and a long session on the allotment on Monday finally allowed us to finish up all but one of them. Just in time I'd say - 'early spring' is most definitely over now we've hit April!

We finally finished digging over what was previously our strawberry bed, which will be our flower patch this year and hopefully bring looooads more beneficial insects to the plot, as well as giving us flowers to cut and give away. I planted out the corncockle, calendula and clary sage I raised at home over winter, and I'll sow lots more here in a couple of weeks...

We've also planted up the herb patch round the pond and fruit trees. The focus here isn't on culinary herbs, as they're much more useful grown at home where you can grab them easily as you need them, but on flowering perennial herbs for insects and some herbs which I'd like to try drying for tea - lemon balm, camomile and peppermint. I've also popped a few perennial and self-sowing flowers in; some poached egg plant and primroses, an oriental poppy and an echinops. Maybe I should call it my 'companion plants patch' instead of my herb patch.

There's still a bit of work to do to get rid of the last of the grass in that corner by the pond... But it's so good to have this area looking nice again after it got swamped with grass and then we mulched it with manky cardboard over winter!

When we moved our compost bins last summer, there was a lot of good compost in the bottom that we just couldn't use at the time, so it's been heaped up in the place where the compost bins were ever since - we even grew our beans late last summer on the temporary raised bed it created...

...but now we've levelled the ground and moved the pile to this year's potato bed, where it will help build the soil. Our greenhouse will go in this spot this year. I hope the people on the next plot sort out their compost pile soon - it's a bit of a battle to stop it falling onto our plot, and there are brambles growing in it which keep finding their way into this bed.

While we were on the plot I also took the opportunity to sow some more seeds: I scattered some dill and parsley seeds in some carefully-chosen corners, and sowed beetroots, turnips and parsnips in rows in our roots bed, a foot apart, and covered with sieved compost.

 

Do you like my new plant labels? They look a bit industrial, but I was desperate to find something that would last for years, instead of perishing in the sun or rotting in the rain or just getting kicked about and lost in the dirt, and I hope these are the answer. They're from Amazon - I tried to find another supplier but couldn't - by a company called GardenMate. The permanent marker is supposed to last all season, and I'll be able to clean it off with a solvent cleaner to reuse them. That's the theory, anyway...

I'm happy that we have some broad beans on the plot at last, after a bit of a battle against mice eating the seeds! These were actually sown at home in a big seed tray at the beginning of March, and planted out this week. There are a few more sown direct here too, and covered with the same mesh to try to keep the rodents off this time. I have half a feeling I'm going to go down there and find little holes chewed right through the netting one of these days!

At home, I've sown lots more seeds, including celery, basil, dill, perpetual spinach, pea shoots and some more flowers; sunflowers, achillea and cerinthe. After a manic March, I think I've just about caught up with myself. The only things remaining are to clear and dig over the old asparagus bed, which is small and shouldn't take too long, and plant out my poor sweet peas which are getting desperate for some space and some support! Poor things!

I'm glad it's April now and the weather must warm up a bit more soon. I feel like I've got a bit of a holiday coming up over the long Easter weekend, and I'll probably get stuck into some more sowing: courgettes, squashes, brassicas and beans are next, as well as the bulk of the flower patch, getting the greenhouse sorted - and it'll be time to plant potatoes before we know it!

Sowathon!

March has been a busy month for many reasons, and I've been way behind with seed-sowing for the new season, but in the last week I've squeezed in a few hours in the garden and taken the opportunity to catch up!

This time last week was the spring equinox, when the days become longer than the nights again (hurrah!), and it seemed like a good time to sow my tomato seeds. I potted up all the pepper, chilli and aubergine plants from the propagator - they're looking big and healthy and have been spending daytimes out in the plastic greenhouse (pic above) - and I sowed five varieties of tomatoes in their place: Amish Paste (a good cooking tomato, but tasty sliced as well), Dr Carolyn (delicious heritage variety!), Angelle (my favourite, from seeds saved from supermarket toms), Skykomish (a blight-resistant variety) and Indigo Rose (the 'black tomato', super-high in antioxidants). They all popped up in just four days and are growing away on the windowsill now. The electric propagator is a real help in getting warmth-loving seeds to germinate!

They look a bit leggy - I guess we've had some gloomy days lately - but they'll catch up with themselves and I'll plant them deep when I pot them up.

We spent a couple of hours topping up the big raised bed in the garden, with the last half-bag of the compost we bought for the purpose last year, plus a layer of new multi-purpose compost. I treated the bed with sulphur before sowing to try to begin lowering its high pH (see previous post), but I decided it might be overcautious to limit what I sow in it this year - after all, growth did seem to improve quite a lot during the course of last season, and the layer of fresh compost should help a bit too - so I'm trying a bigger variety of veg in it than I originally planned. It won't take long to see whether they grow well or not, and I can always resow something else later... The bed already contains some parsley, chives, garlic and perpetual spinach from last year, and I filled up the rest of the space with rows of carrots, turnips, lettuce, spring onions, komatsuna, watercress, spinach, kohlrabi, radishes and mustard.

I also sowed some more celeriac seeds. I had been hardening off my young celeriac plants, but then I read somewhere that if celeriac gets too cold in its first spring it can think it's in its second year, and go to flower rather than producing a good root. Last year's celeriac didn't actually go to flower, but it was a terrible failure and I wondered if my early-hardening-off could possibly be why... So this new set of seedlings will be coddled indoors until the temperatures are higher out there, and we'll see if it makes a difference!

The corner garden bed needed a good clear-up - it had quite a few weeds, last year's bean poles and old bean and pea plants, and some honeysuckle and snowberry invading fast. Once tidied, I sowed some peas and mangetout against the fence, and scattered mint leaves and chopped up dry mint stems over them to keep the mice away - it works a treat!

 

Finally, I sowed some chard, leaf celery and flowers (cerinthe and achillea) in cells in the plastic greenhouse, and planted some early 'Accent' potatoes in sacks. The potato shoots could be harmed by frost after they appear, so I'll need to keep an eye on them and keep earthing them up or throw fleece over them on cold nights. I've got six of these bags so I'll sow two more in two weeks, and two more two weeks later, to spread out my harvest a bit.

I'm nearly caught-up but there's still plenty more to do, and it'll be April in just a few days... In fact, I'd better get back out there!

An Alternative Fruit Patch

The bottom end of our allotment has never been very productive - unless you count couchgrass and nettles. When we first dug it over the soil was very dry and fully of woody matter and old roots, not to mention half an ancient greenhouse, in small pieces. It's also in the shade of an elder tree and next door's little shed for part of the day.

We grew outdoor tomatoes down here and they very quickly succumbed to disease. We grew artichokes here and they all died. We grew raspberries here, and even they didn't do well! The couchgrass seems to move in here faster than anywhere else but nothing else seems to thrive.

Last year we moved our compost bins to this area - it seemed a better use of land that won't easily grow crops, and it would help to stamp out some of the grass and nettles that kept invading. But that still left our overgrown raspberry patch to deal with. Half the raspberries had died and the rest were swamped in a jungle of grass.

We took out the old raspberry plants and dug the bed over three times to get rid of every last grass root we could find. Then we laid a new weedproof-fabric-and-woodchip path down one side of it, dug a trench along the top where it meets the next (derelict) plot, and put a border of weedproof fabric along the end of the plot too, so it should be much harder for new roots to find their way in.

I was keen to keep the area as permanent planting, since our three main rotation beds are working nicely now and perennial planting has benefits for the soil and wildlife as well as my workload! But I wanted to try some new fruits; I do like raspberries but I'm not a fan of the other usual berries and currants people tend to grow on allotments, and I fancied trying some new things I'd been hearing about. So our new fruit patch will feature... Japanese wineberries, Chilean guavas, and Cape gooseberries!

Botanist James Wong famously promotes a number of unusual crops, and his book 'Homegrown Revolution' encourages gardeners to ditch some of the 'old-fashioned' stuff we've been growing for generations but that is actually quite tricky in our climate (aubergines and cauliflowers, for example) in favour of more exotic crops that actually grow very easily here. I have only just bought the book this week, but the above fruits all feature in it - and I'm rather tempted by one or two others he recommends too - perhaps another year!

EDIT: Whoops, the Japanese wineberry isn't in the book - I think I heard about it in a conversation about unusual crops which centred around the book and assumed it was.

Japanese wineberry is similar to raspberry but with striking red stems and lime-green leaves, and the fruits are surrounded by a spiny calyx that means birds don't usually go for them. It can handle a little bit of shade, so the shed shadow shouldn't bother it. I'm not really sure what its growing habit is going to be like - I'm kind of expecting it to be like a bramble! - but I am well prepared to train it up some canes if need be...

Chilean guavas are small berries that ripen in the winter on a rather attractive evergreen bush. I bought these plants nearly a year ago when I saw them on sale and they have been waiting patiently in pots at home until now! (I have two more in large containers at home too, from which I got just a few berries last year, though I think I picked them before they were ripe!)

Cape gooseberries (or Inca berries, or golden berries) are perhaps better known, and sometimes seen served at wedding receptions and posh restaurants, usually with smoked meats. The fruits are similar to tomatilloes, but sweet and golden yellow, and come in a papery husk. They're grown as an annual in this country, so it's not exactly permanent planting, but it also means I can change my mind easily and try a cocktail kiwi or something here next year instead if I like... I've sown the Cape gooseberry seeds at home (no seedlings yet...) and I'll plant them out here in June or so.

I'm not really sure how big these plants get so that's all I'm putting in for now, but I hope my alternative fruit patch will fill up some more in time. For the moment I've put in some biennial flowers too - foxgloves and wallflowers I had in pots at home - and I might just put in some perennial achillea or summer bulbs or something... The biennials should have been planted out in autumn really so I'm not sure how they'll get on, but the part-shaded spot behind the shed must be about perfect for foxgloves so I hope they will self-seed there and I'll keep a small patch of them going.

I'm very glad this troublesome corner is under control again, and I hope the trenched and covered edges will help it to stay that way!

Stevia and Oysterleaf

After my chillies, peppers, aubergines and leeks, next on the list to sow this month were two unusual leaf crops; stevia and oysterleaf.

Stevia (stevia rebaudiana) is an extremely sweet-tasting leaf that can be used as a natural sweetener, 150 times sweeter than sugar. I was given some seeds last year but failed to get any to germinate - but ended up buying a small plant at a nursery later on in the summer. It didn't get very big and I didn't harvest more than a few leaves from it, but after its tiny white flowers faded I made sure to save some seeds for another attempt this year.

(Whole stevia leaf isn't approved by the Food Standards Agency as a food for human consumption - even though it's been eaten for centuries in South America and in Asia since the seventies - so it can't be marketed as food in its natural form. You can buy approved stevia extracts (you might have noticed the new Coca Cola 'Life' is part sweetened with a stevia derivative) but watch out for their purity. Truvia, the 'big brand' option marketed as a natural stevia-derived sweetener, has as its main component erythritol, a sugar alcohol similar to sorbitol, mannitol and xylitol, which is fermented from dextrose, a sugar made from corn.)

I haven't managed to find much out about how to sow the seeds, except that it's tricky and they need a lot of light. The seeds are very tiny, so I have sown some under a light sprinkling of soil and some on the surface. It's very easy for surface-sown seeds to dry out, so I've put the whole pot in a plastic bag to retain moisture, and I'm keeping them on a bright windowsill and crossing my fingers... If I have any success, I hope to experiment more with my harvest this year and find some good ways to use it! I'll also try to overwinter a plant (like I should have done last year!) to avoid the tricky germination game next year - I think they grow as perennials in warmer climates...

Oysterleaf (mertensia maritima) or 'sea bluebells' is another edible leaf crop, with round, blueish, fleshy leaves supposed to taste like - you guessed it - oysters. It's not to be confused with salsify - a root crop sometimes known as oysterplant! It's a perennial (you know I'm a sucker for perennial edibles!) and it has really pretty edible purple and blue flowers, similar to borage - it's in the same family. Again, I was given some seeds last year but failed to grow them successfully (I think a snail got them!) so it's round two this year, with seeds purchased from Pennard Plants. There were only five seeds in the pack, so again I'm having to be careful with them! The seeds are relatively big so I've sown them a few millimetres deep and I'm keeping a close eye on them to make sure they don't dry out. They're not going in a plastic bag, as they grow wild in the Hebrides so I don't think they want to be too warm. But I will be keeping them safely indoors, away from snails, this time! (Until they're bigger, anyway.)

In other seedy news, I've also now sown some stock and snapdragon seeds for my new flower patch, and my first aubergine seedlings popped up on Thursday, just five days after sowing, closely followed by the chillies and the leeks after seven days. It's all go!

2014

It's easy to think that winter is a quiet time for gardeners, but there's plenty to be done. Between harvesting winter crops, checking fleeces and stakes, winter digging, construction projects and maintenance, nurturing overwintering plants and looking after little seedlings in the greenhouse, there's also plenty of planning to be done, and it inevitably involves a good look back over the past growing season to see what worked and what didn't.

2014 was a pretty bumper year for us, but there are always lessons to be learned. Our plot was under a couple of feet of floodwater for a week early on in the year, but thankfully it didn't do any real damage or set us back - we just had some extra clearing up to do, and to be patient in waiting for the soil to dry out again. We've settled on a new 'structure' for our plot, with three main beds in a rotation plus a number of perennial areas, and we made several new paths. We failed to cultivate the difficult far corner of the plot or our old strawberry bed, but we did clear them and cover them up to stifle the weeds and make the job easier later. We planted a new perennials bed with asparagus, artichokes, strawberries and herbs - hopefully some perennial kale will go in here too. We built new compost bins in a new area, and grew beans on the super-fertile patch where the old bins were. We also upped our growing game in the garden at home, converting a shrub bed to grow vegetables and adding three raised beds - more on all that in another post.

2013, compost bins. 2014, French beans. 2015 greenhouse!

We tried a new way of adding fertility to our plot; the 'Complete Organic Fertiliser' recommended by Steve Solomon for rebalancing soil nutrients for maximum plant health and nutrition. Though I can't quantify the results or compare to a 'control' area, I have to say everything on the plot just grew better than ever with virtually no problems, and I am quite sure the COF helped that happen. I will be going one step further this year: sending some soil samples off for laboratory analysis and creating a custom mix to balance it even better.

Another thing we trialled was 'Rootgrow' or mycorrhizal fungi, endorsed by the RHS; a mix of natural fungi that forms symbioses with plant roots and gives plants access to more nutrients and water. It's primary recommended use is in planting trees and shrubs, to help them establish quicker and more easily, but it is supposed to help any plant so I used it under every single crop to see what happened. In theory it should drought-proof plants and help fruits and roots to swell more steadily and evenly. In practice, though we had great growth almost everywhere and the new asparagus and artichokes established without a hitch, my container potatoes gave identical yields whether I used the Rootgrow or not, the newly-planted strawberries didn't establish well for some reason, squashes and swedes came in a huge mix of sizes, and my celeriac completely failed to swell, so I'm not entirely convinced...

Potatoes did wonderfully - we managed to grow a kilo for every week of the year. (If only I had somewhere better to store them - they are now sprouting and turning soft). Scab was very bad on our old favourite Kestrel, but we also tried Pentland Crown this year, which makes a much better baked jacket spud, seems to store slightly better, and doesn't suffer as much scab, so we will be growing more of these in 2015! On reflection I wondered if I should have left the lime out of the COF applied to this area, as it probably made it worse.

Carrots were our best ever, even though we couldn't find our enviromesh in time to protect our first sowing so we lost some to carrot fly - our later sowings did brilliantly and they even won a first placing in the allotment association show! We have only succeeded with carrots since we added lime to our soil - perhaps they need the extra calcium.

Pumpkins and squashes did brilliantly too; we brought home 18 lovely fruits and many are still sitting around happily on windowsills and doormats waiting to be eaten. Arguably we might have expected even more squashes from our eight plants - some plants only gave us one or two fruits - but they suffered from quite a lot of weed competition... Turns out it wasn't such a good idea to undersow them with clover; clover actually gets quite big and unruly when it wants to!

Leeks, parsnips, swedes, broad beans and beetroots all got along just fine. Beetroots really are just THE easiest vegetable to grow - nothing seems to stop them. I only wish Eddie liked them better as I'm eating them mostly by myself. The leeks are suffering from some allium leaf miner and I think we should cover them with mesh next year. We only grew one variety of French beans - a local heritage variety called Ryder's Blue Coco - and I sowed them rather late due to a lack of space earlier on. They were delightful - really tender - and we were eating them long after our neighbours' beans had finished, but we couldn't save any seeds from them because they didn't have time to mature before the first frost, which was a great shame. I do have just a few seeds left so I MUST do better at this next year!

Our chard and winter spinach, planted out in late summer, suffered a bit of neglect due to an extremely busy autumn, but though we lost a few to slugs and snails, they grew superbly and we really should have harvested more from them before the winter. We will still be able to pick from them when growth starts again in early spring though. Our first attempt at fennel suffered the same neglect but also grew very well indeed, and again we failed to harvest it in good time. It's certainly one to try again this year though. We also have a few spring cabbages nearly ready which have done really well - a nice compact variety called Pixie which, assuming it tastes good come spring, I will certainly grow again.

2014 was our first year growing both celery and celeriac. The celery did okay, though it was a bit thin and stringy (I don't usually eat it raw much anyway - just use it for soups, stocks and stews - so that doesn't really matter). The celeriac was a huge disappointment; no root to speak of at all, and I'm not sure why or what to do differently next year...

The importance of beneficial insects really, properly hit home to me last spring when scores of ladybirds descended on our blackfly-infested broad beans and cleared the whole lot up for us. I'm pretty sure there were more ladybirds around than before because I'd grown phacelia in the next bed over winter - ladybirds seem to be attracted by lacy foliage and as we cleared it up in the spring there were loads of them among it. I always grow a few flowers here and there, but now I will grow more!

In the home garden, our courgettes and tomatoes were just fabulous and kept me busy finding new ways to use them! The tomatoes succumbed to blight in the late summer, as they always do. We tried a local heritage variety of tomato - 'Ryder's Midday Sun' - but sadly didn't find them up to a good standard; the plants grew slowly, the tomatoes were watery and lacked flavour, and they were first to succumb to blight! Maybe they'd do better in a greenhouse... But while I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to try them, I'm not sure I have the space to persist with them. Cucumbers and salad greens in our new raised beds did not do well at all and I'm sure there was a problem with the soil - more on that in another post... Peppers did okay but gosh, they take so long to ripen! We were disappointed in a new variety we tried - 'Hebar' - which had very thin flesh and not much flavour at all. The seller described it as "particularly sweet and tasty" so I'd love to know what anyone else thinks of them! We have bought a plastic greenhouse to put on the allotment this summer, which should be just big enough to grow a few tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in. This way we hope to have blight free tomatoes and earlier peppers! We'll still grow some at home too though...

Kaibi Round, Ancho Grande, Hebar, Lipstick

The enviromesh over the kale bed got torn in high winds early in the year, and by late summer caterpillars had stripped the plants as I was too lazy to do anything about it... Thankfully some of the plants made a surprisingly good comeback though! Another mistake I will not repeat next year is planting French beans behind courgette plants. After the courgettes had been growing a month I couldn't reach the beans at all, and had to leave them all to pick for drying instead! The mangetout was great - we could hardly keep up with it - and we were really impressed by variety 'Carouby de Maussane' with giant pods! I have never grown ordinary peas, as frozen British peas are extremely good and convenient, and all the podding seemed like too much of a faff, but last year we did grow a multipurpose mangetout/podding pea - 'Ezeta's Krombek Blauwschokker' - and when they got too big to eat as mangetout I was forced to pod a few... They were so lovely that I might just add a few real podding peas to my garden this year...

Carouby de Maussane mangetout - still gorgeously sweet and tender at this size!

The 'perennial salad mix' from Suffolk Herbs turned out to be a mix of chicories and radicchios, which have grown well but... I just don't really like the taste. Admittedly I should have read the back of the pack more carefully, but this picture is a bit misleading I think!

All in all, we will do much the same this year as last, but here are the things we plan to do differently:

• Grow more flowers - to include a cutting-flower patch!
• Do even more to balance our soil nutrition according to Steve Solomon's great book 'The Intelligent Gardener'
• Add a plastic greenhouse to the allotment to grow a few summer veg under cover.
• Don't plant anything behind courgettes!
• Improve raised bed soil.
• Buy more enviromesh, to replace torn piece and cover leeks too.
• Keep squash bed weed-free - perhaps mulch beneath plants - and grow fewer plants so they don't get so tangled.
• Grow some proper peas, perhaps.
• Try harder with celeriac.
• Grow more Pentland Crown potatoes and less Kestrel - and try another new variety too.
• There are always new varieties to try; this year new ones for us include oyster leaf, beefsteak plant, pink banana squash, skykomish tomatoes (supposed to have some blight resistance), marconi rosso peppers, and we're going to attempt to grow cauliflowers for the first time, since we buy them quite a lot...
• We also plan to plant a new fruit patch on the long-neglected and difficult far corner of the allotment, and clear and replant our overgrown herb bed.

Frosty radicchio

Winter Heather to Feed the Bees

I've been feeling a bit bad for the bees in our garden - they've been out and about for a while now due to the mild winter but, except for the odd primrose and a few short-lived crocuses, there are hardly any flowers round here for them. And we've just cut down several years' worth of overgrown honeysuckle, which they'll miss. And I can't expect them to pollinate my tomato plants all summer long if I don't look after them in the winter, can I?!

Reading up on the subject tells me all the usual spring flowers are good for bees - crocuses, primroses, daffodils, rosemary, dead-nettles, forget-me-nots and fruit blossom - but when bees come out super-early like they did this year (I saw several in January) these may not have bloomed yet. Early in the spring, pussy willow and hazel catkins can provide nectar, and winter-flowering plants are a great help too - heather, hebe and lungwort are particularly recommended (though I don't see our lungwort flowering yet...)

So when I spotted these little winter heather plants for sale yesterday, I had to get a couple - it's well known that bees love heather, and winter varieties flower extremely early and for a long time. I picked plants with lots of buds, so I knew they still had plenty of flowering-time left in them.

I planted them out today, forking some compost into our heavy soil first, planting them level with the surface, and treading them in lightly. It may be too little too late this year really, but they'll be much bigger and much earlier next year, to feed our precious pollinators.