Today was a lovely sunny day, but the chilly wind meant it wasn’t entirely pleasant being outdoors. My first job was to get all of the potatoes planted out, which actually didn’t take too long once I’d got the hang of opening up a hole with the trowel to put the potato in. They didn’t take up as much space as I was expecting either, but then I remembered that I was given quite a lot of seed potatoes last year in addition to the ones I’d ordered. I already have International Kidney in the ground and today I added Charlotte, King Edward, Maris Piper and Picasso. They’re all planted on a grid of about 35cm square.
I planted out the first of my sowings (7th March) of calabrese and they looked quite lonely in the bed at the recommended spacing of 60cm, so I added a row of radish down the middle. By the time the calabrese are big enough to need all the space, the radish will be well gone.
They’re now covered by fleece which will stay on for a couple of weeks at least. My plot looks like I’m growing enormous amounts of fleece at the moment. I must have getting on for forty-five square metres of the stuff laid out and there’s probably more to come. Once the fleece comes off I’ll be putting 0.8mm mesh over the top of the plants, supported on the hoops in the top right of the photo, in an attempt to keep pretty much all possible insect life off them. Whilst I was there I had a quick look at the radishes I planted out on 21st March (still under fleece). They’re not far off being ready to eat which is very pleasing. I reckon they’ll be on our plates before the end of the month.
I’ve sown more peas for pods, for shoots and sugar snaps as well as sweet corn and butternut squash. The squashes are in 3″ pots, two seeds per pot to be thinned, but the rest are in module trays.
I’ve not had a lot of success with sweet corn in the past, but I can’t stop trying. I’ve sown 33 seeds, so if I get 25+ plants I’ll be happy. I’m wondering if I should perhaps plant them out spanning two beds to get more of a “square” block overall rather than a long thin rectangle. The recommended spacing appears to be 45cm and my paths are only 60cm wide, so planting close to the edge of the bed on either side wouldn’t be too far off for the purposes of pollination. I’d have six plants spanning the two beds then, which might mean I don’t get very many along the bed. I wonder if I shouldn’t sow a few more and go for a block of 6×6 or 6×7 plants? On the other hand, how much sweetcorn will we want to eat? On the third hand, I guess they can be frozen 🙂 And 42 plants is such a nice number to have… I reckon they’d take up about six and a half square metres of bed, which might leave a handy amount of room for three butternut squashes and three Uchiki Kuri squashes to grow around their feet, and with a path up the middle there’d be no need to fight one’s way through the outside plants to harvest cobs. I’m going to need to buy some more compost for sowing seeds this week anyhow, so perhaps I’ll pick up another packet of seed, just in case 🙂 I think I’ve talked myself into this. I’d best mark out a suitable space somewhere in the plot so I don’t accidentally use it for something else and spoil the plan…