31/3/25 - Potato Second Planting and Plot Update

As spring gathers pace, we've been blessed with further periods of settled and warm weather, although temperatures are still hovering just above zero over-night.  With the weather comes the requirement for watering, so trips to the plot are frequent at the moment.  Things are growing at an impressive rate and it will soon be time to take down the grow tent and lights as any future sowings should survive quite nicely in the polytunnel from now on.  There is however the ongoing battle for shelf space, a juggling act between what needs to be kept undercover versus what can be moved on.  Somethings going to have to give soon!

Warming up

The last update, I wrote about our trip to some local stables to pick up some trailer loads of horse manure to fill up our empty compost bay.  Since putting it all in the bay, I've been monitoring the temperature of the heap, and it's certainly been cooking!  The day the bay was filled, the very first reading was pretty low - around the mid twenties.  After being left for a single day, it had shot up to over 65 degrees!

After a further 24 hours, there were signs that the pile had started to settle more as the weight begun pushing down on the lower layers, and the temperature had increased further.  I'm not sure what constitutes as 'too hot' in the composting world, but the second reading had increased further to just under 79 degrees.  I haven't taken another reading since then, but at some point this week, I'll take another and seed if it starts to settle down.  Once thing is for sure though, that if there are any seeds in there, they should be getting killed off quite nicely!

On the subject of temperatures

Of late, the polytunnel temperatures have remained fairly consistent week on week.  This time around, the low being 1.9 degrees and the high being 44.9 degrees.

Potting on

The next little batch of seedlings have also been potted on, including the French Marigolds.  From the half sized seed tray, I've pricked out around 25 plants.  Added to that, 4 All Year Round cauli seedlings, 6 Pak Choi Joi Choi seedlings and 7 Black Tosca Kale seedlings have been priced out and potting on.  The 5 Brussels Sprouts Brilliant F1 have also been doing well since being pricked out a week or so ago.

Carrot bath change

As the weather has proven to be quite settled an nice, the carrot seed in the bath which was sown back in February have continued to grow and develop nicely, to the point that the seedlings started touching the perspex sheet covering the bath.  Germination hasn't been 100%, but still reasonably good for a first sowing with not many gaps.  Where required, some of the seedlings have also been thinned out, but this was only needed on 5 or 6 plants.  To allow them more room, I have removed the perspex cover totally, and put up the hoops and mesh cover to protect from carrot fly.  This arrangements worked really well last year.  If we do get a drop back down into sub-zero temperatures though, I will need to roll out some fleece over the mesh for a bit of protection.  For the time being though, the forecast isn't showing any cause for concern.

Second sowing potatoes

This year, the quantity of seed potatoes in a bag has seemingly shrunk.  I don't have anywhere near the number of seed potatoes that I have ordered in previous years.  Plus, many of them seem to be quite small, smaller than a golf ball.  Since growing potatoes, I've generally grown 3 varieties each year, in buckets.  A month or so ago, I sowed 4 buckets of Charlotte potatoes, with 3 seeds in each bucket.  This week, to add to that, I have done a second sowing of potatoes, this time Cara which has performed well in the past.  Unfortunately, my order contained only 14 potatoes.  4 of them were of reasonable size and the rest relatively small.  We now have 5 buckets of those in place.

Estimated harvest times for the potatoes sown so far are as follows:

• Charlotte (Sown 9/3/25) - June 15th (14 weeks) 13 - 15 wks
• Cara (Sown 30/3/25) - August 10th (19 weeks)  15 - 22 wks

Busy times ahead

April will see activity ramping up another stage further and jobs will be added to the list on a daily basis I imagine.  This evening we have sown another tray of cut and come again lettuce which puts us into a 3 tray rotation with one being consumed, one germinated and growing and a fresh tray sown.  We will try and keep this up through the year.  I tend not to sow individual heads of lettuce as it's more convenient for us to keep a tray at home that we can take when we need.

Also coming in April, the main crop potatoes will go in.  I'll be breaking with traditional and this year, will be planting them into the ground.  Like the earlies though, we haven't received a great number of seeds potatoes in the order but we should have enough for a couple of rows.  This years main crop variety will be Sarpo Mira.

Going into their final bed imminently will be a tray of Ailsa Craig onions.  They have come on really well and thickened up nicely but are now straining to get out of their root trainers.  I will need to find time to get these out one evening this week if I can.  If all the onions currently in cells and pots come through successfully, we will have too many for the single onion bed.  I do have a plan though which could potentially see me inter-planting onions amongst some other crops like Kale, where we have allocated an whole bed, but for only a handful of plants.  There should be plenty of room for a row or two of onions in there as well.

Since moving all the tomato seedlings and plants up to the tunnel last week, they have come on really strong, and many of them will need potting on into larger pots at some point this week.  Some of them are almost ready to go into their quad grows, but I don't have room to put those in place just yet.  Also, 8 of the plants are due to go outside, but it's still too cold for that to happen at the moment.  I could be another month before I'll be happy enough for that to happen.

On top of all this, there is the next wave of seeds to be sown, but more on that in a future update.