Planting out.

​Having family visit us means there are lots of extra commitments and less time on the allotment. However, late in the afternoon I managed to dash down to the plot with a tray of Dwarf French Beans and some brassica plants in pots.
When I arrived I realised that one row of King Edward potatoes was badly affected by the blight so I set about cutting down the haulms and stuffing them into plastic bags to take down the tip. Next door were my Sarpo Mira potatoes (blight resistant) showing no sign of blight and the King Edwards on the other side have only one or two blemishes.

I also managed to fork most of the pile of grass clippings outside my plot on top of the compost bin covering the kitchen waste I had brought down.

​Then I started planting the French beans. After scraping the horse litter mulch off a strip of soil and cultivating the exposed strip with my Wolf cultivator (a very lethal instrument but very effective), I used my trusty bulb planter to make holes every 8 inches and dropped each plant in a hole. Unfortunately I had only just watered the rootrainer tray and the plants did not have a sufficient rootball to hold the wet soil together, making planting difficult. A dose of water, fertiliser and slug bait finished the job.

Having done that I scraped a similar strip inside the brassica tunnel and planted a row of alternate compact 'Pixie' cabbages and autumn Calabrese at one foot intervals. In the front of the row I fired five All Year Round cauliflower plants spaced a bit further apart. It is a bit late planting them but I hope they will mature before the earliest of the range of cauliflower plants I bought from outside the Trading Hut. A strip of each type will keep me in cauliflowers all winter and through to next April/May.

I then spent some time harvesting peas, a job that cannot be rushed. I reached for my mobile to check whether I should take anything else home only to find it had a dead battery so I rushed home just in time for dinner.