Catching-up

Lovely sunny weather for a couple of days now. So time to cut the grass and try and make things look a bit better. The left-hand deep box is now about full.
The potatoes are all from last year, stored in the fridge over winter. I put the rest of them in the box by the balcony, with last year's molta.
I never got around to starting the beans indoors so I just soaked them overnight and then planted them out - see what happens. Once soaked French beans and Borlotti beans look pretty much the same (and I had already forgotten that I had soaked both!) so they are mixed together in the box.

J. Artichokes still here	French salad potatoes x4	French salad potatoes x4	French salad potatoes x4
Moonlight x5	French salad potatoes x4	Premier x2	Premier x2
Moonlight x5	Masterpiece BB x4	Italian BB x4	Italian BB x4
French beans x9	French beans x9	French beans x9	French beans x3 Black Kale

Wet summer!

Really! Was it summer at all?
A quick run through what happened... a new cat on the block decided that the veg boxes made perfect cat toilets :-( so the few carrots which struggled to germinate were decimated by digging. No carrots at all from the usual sowing period. The "carrot week" ones did rather better and I have a few nice carrots from them. They are Rainbow carrots so not quite as vigorous as normal orange ones, still, better than nothing.
The parsnips which I started indoors look fantastic! At any rate the leaves do, I have not pulled any up yet. The parsnips which I sowed as normal have hardly grown at all so I think this indoor method is the way to go in the future - assuming that it is not all top-growth.
I dug all the French La Ratte potatoes today, we had a couple of meals previously. the tops were being eaten to death by slugs so it seemed wise to get them up and out. Got about 2 kg all told which is pretty good from two squares. The adjacent Premiers are looking good but I left them in for now.
Beans... hmm, well it really was not warm enough when I put them out and the French ones died back. The summer was cold and wet and not a good one for beans. It looks as though there are a few broadbeans and two Borlotti!
The leeks are doing OK, all things considered. I did not thin them properly so perhaps they would be bigger if I had. Worth trying again next year. Same with the onions from seeds, they grew at least large enough to eat.
The shallots did OK, not huge but use-able. They had onion thrips when I took them up.
The Italian kale grew but I never actually used it! Kept waiting for it to get bigger. The broccoli had heads but did not do very well. 
The garlic was pretty successful. Both the cloves saved from last year and the 2nd year bulbs grew nicely. The purple ones from Frú Lauga did not do much - I may have pulled them up too early though, they may be a later variety. The soft neck from Italy did not make very big bulbs, they look as though they have divided but not grown much. May stick some of those back in later.
The rhubarb did very well, I took three small crops off it and it grew all summer. The strawberries suffered from lack of sun. I just picked the redcurrants and got about 600 g of those plus a handful of white currants.
There is a plague of slugs now, munching the potato grass and the last few strawberries.

Ascension Day planting

We have had lovely weather for the last couple of days and even though it is set to rain now, the temperature has at least gone up a bit and it does not look as though it will freeze... maybe.
Since I had so many indoor things ready to go out I decided just to plant them and hope for the best.
The parsnips which I started indoors were ready to go way too soon I think. They had roots curled up at the bottom of the paper pots so I can't see that they will develop long roots but I put them out anyway. They will need thinning and if I pull up a few and the roots look hopeless I will just pull them all up and plant something else.
I put the potatoes out now too, a bit later than last year. Two sorts, French salad ones which I saved from last year, and some which must be Premier or similar, from a supermarket.
I put out the Italian Kale, four plants to a square, and the calebrese/broccoli, two per square. I also planted out the leeks and the onions grown from seed, and some Alpine strawberry plants. And one parsley plant, I have more of those and some more strawberry plants indoors.
The bean plants are all up now. They can't go out just yet so maybe I should have planted them a little later, will have to see about that.
I watered everything and then covered with fleece.
I will post diagrams of the planting scheme later, once the boxes are full.
The strawberry box is doing well, some plants have flowers already. I noticed that at least one cutting of honeysuckle from my sister's/father's has survived. Also what must be a Bramley apple grown from seed. I put them in the coldframe, each in their own pot, because it seemed they were more likely to survive there than indoors.