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Category: Allotment Diary

Sowing the right seeds

Published on Mar 18, 2017Jun 21, 2017 by Richard Chivers10 Comments

For the first time since I began growing my own, I’ve kept the promise to myself to have patience when sowing the first seeds. Continue reading “Sowing the right seeds” →

Categories Allotment Diary•Tags Allotment, Allotment Diary, seeds, sowing, Spring

Happy New Year – Allotment reflections and plans for the new season

Published on Jan 3, 2017Mar 26, 2017 by Richard Chivers10 Comments

Happy New Year!

January has arrived and I’m excited. It might be the middle of winter, but New Year always makes me feel rejuvenated. Continue reading “Happy New Year – Allotment reflections and plans for the new season” →

Categories Allotment Diary•Tags Allotment, GYO, New year

I'm Richard and I'm passionate about growing fruit and vegetables on our family allotment. Sharpen your Spades is a blog to inspire anybody to pull on the wellies and join the grow your own community.

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Here's the tomato plants. This week, I've moved them from indoors, potted them up from their small pots and put them in my little, wooden greenhouse in my garden. As I said on my stories last night, it's now time to keep a close eye on the weather. If there's a frost, then they spend the night indoors with me. In the day, the temperature is much better. These won't need another pot on now, they will go into the polytunnel around mid May. There's still a chance of frost here in Cardiff until then and the polytunnel will not protect plants from frost. But don't they look such pretty little things 🌱 Tomatoes were sown middle of March. This means they are a manageable size right up until I can put them in the polytunel.

Thrilled to be growing a few, small batches of peas from @heritageseedlibrary this year. I'm a member of the Heritage Seed Library (HSL) which aims to conserve vegetable varieties that are not widely available. The HSL isn't a gene bank and all of the collection become available for members to grow and enjoy. A huge part of this for me is about growing open pollinated varieties which are just not available through the major commercial companies. It's about preserving these varieties and importantly, sharing them. If you want to hear even more about the importance of seeds just like these, @sow_much_more and I talk all about seeds, open pollinated varieties and why we need to give seeds so much more respect in episode 2 of @the.seed.pod 🌱

The nasturtiums are coming! Took their time 🌱

Every year they are the first. Tulip - peppermint stick 🌷

Chilli plants update. Some people messaged asking for a better look at my Chilli plants from my stories earlier so I had them strike a pose 🌱

I'm terrible with brassicas. Mainly because the birds and caterpillars get them every year because my netting has blown off in a gale 😆 this year I'm growing a few early cabbages. One, because I don't grow them enough and two, I have more space to grow them. They do take a bit of space and I tend to prefer other veg when I'm presented with the decision. I'll protect them a lot better this year too. These were sown indoors in February. Bit of of warmth to germinate thr seeds but they are cold tolerant and so as soon as they were up, I put them in the little wooden greenhouse in my garden to grow on. I might plant them out this weekend 🌱

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