After a couple of handfuls of rocket over the last few weeks and three or four asparagus spears, last night I picked the first decent crop of the year: my broadbeans (you can see the lovely flowers and how they looked last week)! They are still smallish, but enough to make a lovely pasta sauce.

I also harvested mint, sage and oregano as their flavour is best before flowering, and flower buds are just forming.

Pity it is impossible to reproduce the exhilarating bouquet of scents and the amazing variety of textures and shades of green.

While veg start cropping outside, inside the greenhouse something magical is underway.

A step back. I sort of like rhododendrons, pretty stunning colours if you manage to grow and keep them alive. Not generally overexcited about them though.

This spring, however, having a walk alongside a garden, I was struck by the most delicious sweet fragrance, which came from white rhododendron flowers, the slightest tinge of pink to the ample petals. Something possessed me and I wanted the plant, at all costs! If that is the instinct that drove botanist explorers to carry over plant specimens from any corner of the world I understand it: it was pretty powerful…

However, I would never consciously damage a plant, particularly someone else’s. On some of the branches I could see a few remaining bunches of old, empty and dried seedpods. No harm done if I pick a couple, surely? I did it with very little hope. Their time was long gone.

Once home, a few husk-like flecks came out of the pods’ folds. The flecks were minuscule, they could at best be underdeveloped leftovers from proper seeds. No image online of rhododendron’s seeds to compare them to. Only very discouraging instructions on how to grow rhododendrons from seed.

Still under the spell of that plant’s beauty, I decided to sow anyway.

One seedling came out. Minuscule. I thought weed but nurtured it anyway, just in case. More tiny, wormlike seedlings. Now I think that’s the genuine article.

With a bit of luck, a few years down the line I will find out that one of them looks and smells like “mum”.

— Post From My iPhone

Last night I arrived on the plot with the mission to sow some more seeds, as I do not have much time to get the next generation of veg ready to plant out.

However, on opening the shed I realised I had no working clothes! Going home and back was out of the question: too tired I would have succumbed to the lure of the sofa… so I looked around for inspiration… and decided to don a bin bag!

Not quite the style, but I was sitting in the greenhouse so no shocked neighbours either 🙂

And, though not comfortable, it was worthwhile: I sowed salad, brassicas, beans and peas of several species besides carrots.

I hope to get better results especially with brassica by not sowing directly in the ground. Time will tell.

— Post From My iPhone

I had not been at the allotment for a couple of days and I should know how it works by now: rain and warmish weather are good! Still I was surprised but how fast vegetation is growing. Especially weeds. But I found another sage seedling, and a bronze fennel one. I wish I could express the joy that stirred in me, despite the miserable greyness of the sky and the drizzle.

Not going so well for my Garden Organic experiments. As I have mentioned already, I enrolled in 3 of them.

1. Monitoring butterflies at the allotment – I was lucky if I saw five in the last couple of months. And a couple of moths. Pretty much depressing.
2. Trying tree spinach as a crop. Germination was very staggered, to the point that the earliest plants are now out and some 20cm tall while the latest are still tiny seedlings. And not growing very fast, but steady. Not so depressing.
3. Growing lettuce under protection of a supposedly anti-slug cardboard collar. The lettuce is growing healthily and slugs and snails have not been very active this season. However, while the collars seemed to have a marginal effect at the seedling stage (only 1 non protected lettuce was slightly damaged), now that the leaves have outgrown the cardbord I found a slug on a protected lettuce – damage would have come to very much the same extent as a non protected lettuce if I had not picked the slimy creature and squashed in the usual manner.

My potato picking technique must be rubbish. Either that or potato is such a terrible weed that it is difficult to imagine how famine may ever have occured. Or both. This I say because I have potato shoots sprouting up everywhere, among strawberries, broadbeans, garlic and even cardoon, in the greenhouse and outside.

I also found a tomato seedling among the artichokes, though, which is much of a rarer find, and makes me happier. And my bronze fennel has self seeded, together with the sage, adding to my evergrowing collection of past crops’ persisters: strawberries, raspberries, borage, onions, leeks and all. It’s like previous crops have left a ghost behind!

Everything is growing everywhere, which is not tidy, but I am sure insects like it: we have a lot of tiny bumblebees and I have seen the biggest native ladybird ever. No butterflies, though.

A flurry of activity, at this time of the year with sowing, planting out and potting on , and a few “earlies” are starting to appear: a couple of strawberries, some rocket… but still no main crops.

— Post From My iPhone

After two years and a half on the allotment I have just realised in a frightening eureka moment that I have been killing my best friends: ground beetle larvae – notorious slug predators – because I was not sure whether they might be chafer grubs. Well, they are not! How could I be so silly?!?

As I was digging a little space for my courgettes & pumpkins I found a lovely moth that I had never seen before and goes by the intriguing name “ruby tiger” (Phragmatobia fuliginosa). It was very friendly indeed, climbing on my glove to be moved away, and I discovered later that my patch must be its ideal habitat, as it feeds on dock and dandelion, both of which are plentiful; it is quite strange I never saw the hairy caterpillar before!

Unfortunately I did not have a camera with me; luckily it was a prettiy conspicuous and unique moth whose image is easily available online.

Through a picture of mine, on the other hand, I identified the tiny pest that has chomped on my broadbean’s leaves: the rather prosaically named pea (leaf) weevil (Sitona lineatus) it was! Golden brown and rigged, I have not found an organic control method yet. Anyone has a suggestion? It looks like larvae feed on the nitrogen-fixing nodules on the roots, thus reducing crops…

— Post From My iPhone