12/1/25 - Sowing, Growing and Theatre
This week, Winter has shown up at long last, and we have experienced a good week of hard frosts and icy days which, as many allotment owners will tell you, is an essential part of the annual cycle of working an allotment. Anything sitting in the ground, dormant for winter will be reminded of the reasons of it's dormancy and knows it's a bit too early to start pushing on with it's new growth. Garlic also needs a good period of cold and frost weather as it's said that it helps with bulb development, splitting into cloves, before the warmer weather of spring helps it push on with the rest of the growing period. And let's not forget what else the cold weather does to pests and bugs like slugs and ants. The cold weather keeps a check on them and kills many off. You can always tell if you've had a mild winter because pests the following spring seem to come out with a bang and seemingly have a head start in their numbers.
In the polytunnel, the thermometer reading for the week has show an impressive range of temperatures. While they have plummeted by night, during the day when the sun has come onto the tunnel, inside temperatures have proven to be quite balmy!
On the subject of the polytunnel, this weekend has seen this years sowings of sweet peas taking place. All being well, we should end up with around 70 plants if germination goes well. They're safely tucked up on the suspended shelf, away from mice and pests. This year, we've got with the varieties Patio Mixed and Galaxy Mixed. We'll see how well they progress.
Last weeks sowing of cut and come again lettuce is still yet to germinate, which isn't surprising, and the spare brassicas which were brought in before the proper cold weather set in are sitting there looking very healthy. It looks like I will have a bit of room in the hooped tunnel and this weekend, I covered the remainder of that bed with a couple more barrows of digestate. I'll leave that bed alone for a couple more weeks, and then perhaps transplant the brassicas into the bed to see if we can get an early crop from them by late spring.
Thanks to some Christmas money, I've also invested in another two sets of quadgrow grow pots. They've also been taken up to the polytunnel where they'll be put to very good use probably around April time.
Also this weekend, I did another 3 sowings and put them on the Super 7's. The first were some back up Ailsa Craig onions. Though the first sowings have started to show signs of germination, I won't know how successful germination in general has been for a few weeks yet. The first sowings were done onto a bed of peat based compost I had left from a year or two ago, then covered them with vermiculite. The back up sowings were just done in compost. Also on the propagator are the first tomato seeds of the year, Red Cherry. I only need a couple of these seedlings to progress onto mature plants, but I'll grow on whatever I have room for, and probably give the remainder away once I am sure I don't need them. Finally, for the first time this season, we're going to be trying to grow aubergines. The variety is Black Beauty, and they've taken up another small seed tray. Again, I only need 2 plants to reach maturity, but we will see how they germinate and develop.
Skipping right back to the start of the weekend, and Friday night in the Blake Theatre, Monmouth. We had a great evening in the audience, watching Kate Humble and Monty Don 'in conversation' live on stage. They are both patrons for a local charity 'Bees for Development' which you can read about here. It was a really interesting evening with humour, stories, a bit of bad language, surprisingly little about gardening and bees but with a lot on the jewellery business!
So that is how this growing week and weekend has panned out. My monthly jobs in terms of sowing and planting have now been completed for January, but there is always plenty to do either on the plot, or at home. I can turn my attention back to the fabric of the plot again for a little while now. Jobs I want to get completed in the coming weeks include sourcing some woodchip so I can finish off the polytunnel path and door area, cutting out the mesh from the heras fencing so I can use it to make a cucumber/pumpkin arch and also keep an eye out for any old patio pavers going spare for the pathways between the main beds. Then, there's always manure. With one of the two compost bays empty, I now have plenty of space for another couple of trailers of manure which I will look at getting from the stables in the coming weeks.
