Marching on

   I'm short of time this week due to work and another volunteer commitment (not gardening though), which has really frustrated me. I decided that today would be my gardening day despite having to fit in family chores as well.

   I've been working mostly in the polytunnel today, sowing yet more seeds and potting on seedlings that were in need of stretching their roots.

   Firstly, I checked the broad beans and I'm still losing more Bunyards variety to root rot, which is annoying to say the least. Even though the plants are getting bigger two more have succumbed to this fungal infection. They were promptly thrown away to try and prevent more from getting this. I also kept a good look out for pests and found a small handful of aphids (greenfly) on one plant and just like the diseased plants, the aphids were quickly removed!

Can you spot the aphid on the broad bean? Take a close look.

   I also potted on some of my bigger tomato seedlings. These were Red Cherry, Money Maker and Gartenperle. I moved them on from their cells to half litre pots, which should be more than enough room for a few weeks before I transfer these to the raised bed in the poly.

   Remember that hotbed idea...
   ...well, I gave up the old Victorian method and today I've been working on adding more poultry manure by burying it a foot below the top soil. It'll be here that the tomato plants will go, along with a courgette plant and a couple of aubergine plants. You may be wondering why I haven't just transplanted the larger seedling straight into the raised bed but there's a few reasons why I haven't:

1. I want the manure to rot a bit more before putting the plants in.
2. Being a poultry keeper I do, unfortunately, suffer with having rats in the garden occasionally and they have taken to damaging a lot of plants in the past. So I'm keeping the young seedlings out of harm's way until they get much bigger.
3. The poly alone doesn't offer much frost protection should temperatures drop severely, so I have the small pots under some cover within the poly before hardening off first.

   The seeds focused on today were radishes, carrots, parsley root, parsnips and sweetcorn. All but the sweetcorn were sown directly into the second raised bed. The soil in this raised bed is nice and crumbly and not too stony, which should be perfect for root veg. The other thing I want to advise is that for this bed I didn't add any fresh compost or fertilizer prior to sowing. Too much fertilizer will cause carrots to fork, which can be awkward when preparing in the kitchen. The soil I have was already rich in nutrients as I treated it a while ago. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't add nutrients for your growing carrots - just don't use too much.

 The soil in this raised bed was raked over carefully to produce a nice even surface.

 Even an indoor raised bed will have plenty of like in it.

 After raking I created small trenches for the rows of seeds to be sown into.

 These were the varieties sown in that bed, all with prepared labels.

Sowing small seed thinly isn't the easiest of tasks so once these will (hopefully) start growing, they may need to be thinned out.

   The sweetcorn variety I had sown today was Incredible, which is an F1 variety. So what are F1's? The F stands for Filial and is basically the first offspring of cross breeding or creating a hybrid. You'll find that F1's tend to be more expensive than other seeds and this is usually because that selective breeding will give you seeds that produce more and might be better disease resistant.

   Next week I'm going to try and work on the allotment some more, especially as subs are due! The plot will need weeding and digging over and I will start planning what goes where by drawing out some plans.

Until now, keep gardening!