Week 52+24 - Bed DD4

Week 52+24 - Bed DD4

Week 52+21 - Bed DD4

Week 52+7 - Bed DD4

The soil in this bed has been carefully cultivated to kill off some weeds and to allow the rain to filter into the beds instead of running off into the paths.

All of the young broad bean plants are doing well and are taking advantage of the recent fair weather.

Week 52+5 - Bed DD4

Eight weeks after sowing, the broad beans are growing well. Several of the seeds have failed to germinate, or have been pulled up by birds, and will be resown once the soil warms up. Notice the soil compaction and capping due to the heavy rains, and the signs of pooling of water in the paths.

Some of the seedlings have started to develop their third pair of leaves.


We dug up one of the seedlings to have a look, and the root system is already well developed and reaches at least 15cm down into the soil. No nitrogen fixing nodules are visible yet.

Week 49 - Bed DD4

We cultivated this bed to remove the few struggling seedlings and weeds and sowed two long rows of:

• Aquadulce Claudia Broad Beans (two double staggered rows, 48 seeds) - an excellent autumn sowing variety which establishes itself very quickly and will produce a very early crop. It is white seeded with pods up to 23 cm long.

Before covering the seeds we added soil from another garden where peas and beans had grown earlier in the year, in an attempt to introduce nitrogen fixing bacteria which we have found to be absent from the plot.

Week 47 - Bed DD4

With the exception of a few scattered seedlings, nothing has grown in this bed (or else everything that sprouted has been eaten). This is possibly due to the cool conditions, or the low light levels under the fleece that covered the bed for a few weeks. A polytunnel might have helped. We will likely resow this bed with some overwintering plants.

Week 40 - Bed DD4

Two weeks after sowing, some of the beetroot have started to sprout under the fleece ...

... and so have some of the carrots.

Week 38 - Bed DD4 Planting

We cleared the bed of any remaining weeds and onions, lightly dug the soil and prepared a fine seedbed. The bed was divided into 5 equal sections and broadcast sowed:

• Amsterdam Forcing 3 Carrot - an early variety that is very quick to mature, small cylindrical roots with a rich deep orange red colour and almost no core
• Jeanette F1 Carrot - an early maturing Nantes type variety with smooth conical roots and vigorous foliage making pulling easier
• Boro F1 Beetroot - a hybrid variety with deep red internal colour, fine texture and taste
• Nantes II Carrots - an early, small cored, medium length, blunt variety
• Guardsman Scallions - very strong upright salad onion variety, especially suitable for autumn crop.

There were only a limited quantity of some of the carrot seeds, but we are planning to thin the beds quite thoroughly so that each plant has the space to grow quickly.

We covered the bed with fleece, and later in the season, we will be building a small polytunnel out of bent wire and a sheet of plastic, which will cover the entire bed. This protection and added warmth will help the plants to continue growing into the winter, and will hopefully provide us with tender sweet carrots, beetroot and onions through the winter.

Week 35 - Bed DD4

We pulled everything up from the bed and laid the harvest on the surface to dry a bit.

The onions (left) to the left are a nice size, the shallots (top right) are quite big, but a lot of the garlic (bottom right) are small.

There were quite a range of onion sizes, with the two on the right representing the smallest and largest of the healthy plants. A few of the onions were rotten like the one on the left, and a few more (second from the left) seem to have been pressed into the soil at an angle when they were young possibly by one of the local dogs walking across the bed and were unable to form a decent bulb.

Week 33 - Bed DD4

Most of the plants in this bed are starting to turn brown, and should be ready to harvest in a few weeks.

The onions and shallots have swelled to a nice size ...

... even with the density that we planted this bed, and the lack of any additional fertility.

Week 31 - Bed DD4

16 weeks after planting, the alliums this bed are growing reasonably well despite the wet weather overt the past month.

The shallots have fully separated adn are starting to swell ...

Most of the garlic plants are reasonably big, and the bulbs are probably starting to swell underground.

The onions are also starting to swell, and will probably continue for another few weeks.

Week 25 - Bed DD4

Shallots starting to separate. The yellow on the tips does not appear on the shallots in other beds.

Garlic ...

... and onions growing well with the recent rain.

Week 24 - Bed DD4

Nine weeks after planting, most of the onion, garlic and shallot sets that we planted are up and doing well. Some of the young plants were pulled up after a few weeks, probably by curious birds, and we replanted the ones we could and replaced others. There are still some gaps, and a few of teh plants are considerably smaller than the others.

Week 15 - Bed DD4 Planting

This bed was prepared by double digging with some of the sod being chopped up and placed between the two layers of soil for extra fertility. In this bed we planted (from south to north):

• Red Sun Shallots (12 bulbs covering 20% of bed) - mild flavoured red variety, ideal for salads and stores well
• Printanor Garlic (40 cloves covering 20% of bed) - spring planting variety with cream coloured cloves harvested in the autumn
• Sturon Onion (120 sets covering 60% of bed) - a golden bulb variety with fine flavour and good storability