Week 52+24 - Bed DD8 planting

Week 52+21 - Bed DD8

Week 52+7 - Bed DD8

The only crop doing really well is still the mizuna ...

... which we have been continuously harvesting leaves from.

Week 52+5 - Bed DD8

Some of the greens have suffered a bit through the cold weather we have had. We did not put up a polytunnel as we had planned, which would have really helped the lettuce in the foreground.

The mizuna is thriving and we have been harvesting continuously.

Several of the rocket plants are starting to bolt, something that normally happens in the summer, but is possibly due to the hard frosts, or simply because of the age of the plants - they generally only produce for a few months.

The Pak Choi is also bolting, probably due to the lack of protection.

The spinach is still producing leaves, but it looks a little ragged.

The chard plants are growing slowly.

Week 49 - Bed DD8

The greens continue to grow, and we have been doing some harvesting ...

... especially the mizuna (bottom) and rocket (top) which are really thriving.

The spinach is ready to harvest as well.

Week 47 - Bed DD8

Many of the greens in this bed have grown very well, especially the rocket and mizzuna which have filled the one section. the corn salad failed to sprout, and some of the chard plants are missing - though I think that this might be due to careless weeding.

Week 40 - Bed DD8

Two weeks after sowing, most of the seedlings have sprouted.

Most of the rows will need to be thinned, including these lettuce seedlings.

The distinctive brassica leaves on the mizuna seedlings.

These Pak Choi seeds were sown a bit too thickly at one end of the bed, and will need to be thoroughly thinned.

The long leaves of the spinach seedlings are easy to distinguish from everything else in the bed.

The rainbow chard seedlings are already showing the different colours, with yellow and white to the left and red to the right. We will have to be careful when thinning to leave a number of each colour.

Week 38 - Bed DD8 Planting

We dug up the remains of the potatoes, added a couple of buckets of well composted horse manure from the neighboring farm and prepared a fine seedbed into which we sowed two rows each of:

• Rainbow Chard - various coloured stems and leaves, baby leaves can be used for salads and cooked when fully grown
• Perpetual Spinach (Leaf Beet) - a beet variety with leaves resembling spinach which can provide valuable greens throughout the winter
• Matador (Atlanta) Spinach - all year round variety with dark green leaves
• Corn Salad D'Orlando - a hardy annual, small nutty leaves, large leaved variety with glossy green leaves
• Pak Choi - Dark leaves and crispy juicy white stems, a salad crop which can be stir fried
• Rucola Coltivata Rocket/Arugula - a refined variety with rich dark leaves and wonderful spicy taste
• Mizuna - a hardy vigorous oriental green leaf with serrated dark green leaves with a mild, slightly mustard flavour
• Endive Pancelerie (only 1/2 row planted, the rest filled in with mizuna) - bulky head variety with dark green serrated outer leaves with white hearts, similar to lettuce though slightly bitter
• All Year Round Lettuce - a pale green compact butterhead variety

As the cold weather arrives, this bed will be covered with a mini polytunnel stretched over wire hoops. In the protected environment, this bed will produce a variety of fresh greens all through the winter and into the spring.

Week 33 - Bed DD8

As the top of the plants continued to die back, we decided to cut them back at the soil level, in order to prevent any blight spores on the leaves and stems from being washed into the soil and infecting the tubers. We have dug up a number of plants and will leave the rest of them in the ground until needed.

The remains of the potato plant, where in this case we can see that the seed potato had sent up 4 stems.

Week 31 - Bed DD8

After a month of wet weather, the potatoes don't look great.

Although there is very little sign of blight on the leaves, many of the stems are stripped bare. There was blight in the area earlier in the month (when we were on holidays), which would have affected the growth, but the leaves appear to have been eaten as well. It seems that it has not been a great year for potatoes in many part of the country.

We dug up a few of the plants and found a reasonable crop of potatoes, none of which have been eaten by slugs as we had expected given the wet weather.

Week 27 - Bed DD8

This first harvest of new potatoes, 11 weeks after planting, dug up from one plant. We were pleased with the yield, given the frost a month ago, and will continue to harvest potatoes as needed.

Week 25 - Bed DD8

Bed of early potatoes that was hit by frost three weeks ago but is recovering better than some of the other plants, especially those of the same variety in bed EX8.

Closeup of chopped grass mulch that had been placed around potatoes to maintain moisture and to prevent the tubers from turning green.

Week 24 - Bed DD8

Planted eight weeks ago, these early potatoes were doing well until they were hit by a very late frost at the end of May which killed off many of the leaves. There is still enough growth on the plants, and they will continue to grow, but are not going to produce as big a yield as the could have.

Week 16 - Bed DD8 Planting

We double-dug this bed and planted:

• Orla Potatoes (36 seed potatoes) - a 1st early variety with creamy white oval tubers with light yellow flesh

These were planted in 3 rows of 12 down the length of the bed and because they are so close together the rows will need to be mulched instead of being earthed to prevent the tubers becoming green.