A beginning and an end

Potato chitting time has arrived again! My Apache potatoes arrived in the post yesterday, so I got them straight into egg boxes and into the cool spare room. These are a maincrop potato variety with attractive red markings. We've been buying them from our local supermarket for mini roasties, so thought I might as well try growing my own. I grew Ulster Classic last year and while they were lovely in taste, they were a bit too floury for my preference - fine if you want mash all the time, but pretty useless for anything else.

This weekend I also need to redo my planting plans for the year. Maybe it was the cold weather and snow cover, but our garden in December and January was suddenly inundated by some very hungry pigeons. There have always been pigeons in the large trees surrounding the suburban veg plot and there have always been winter brassicas in the plot, but this was my first experience of the 2 meeting... And suffice to say, the brassicas came off worse.
The tuscan kale, the early sprouting broccoli, the cauliflowers bought as plug plants, the savoy cabbages - all of it, gone. This is probably gardener's karma for forgetting about them as seedlings in the autumn (see post here). I managed to net the brussels sprouts before Christmas, so saved some of those but the rest was wholly decimated. Were it not for the fact I am vegetarian, there may have been some pigeon pie served up for dinner!

Out of sight, out of mind

Oooops! I just found these in a neglected corner of my garden. Brassica plantlets (savoy cabbage, tuscan kale and early sprouting broccoli) that I moved out of the cold frame in early October and subsequently forgot they even existed. Naughty careless suburban veg gardener!

I've found homes for most of them dotted around the raised beds. Hopefully they'll forgive my neglect and still give me something of a harvest come 2013?

Winter veg in summer

It's around this time of year as the harvests of tomatoes, peas, sugar snaps, courgettes, chillies, mangetout and broad beans really get going that I tend to forget all about planning for the winter season. Winter cabbages, kale and purple sprouting broccoli should all be sown in the next month or so to be ready to eat once the summer and autumn gluts are dwindling. So, as this year is the 'Year of the Organised Suburban Veg Plot' I've set aside all of the brassicas from my seed tin in order to select what to sow for the winter. And at the same time, glanced around my garden to plan where this veg could be planted out when the time comes. And that's when I noticed a rogue kale plant I omitted to pull up in the spring. It must have been a small one for me to miss though the fact it's in the far corner of the plot and involves clambering over a big pile of canes might be more the reason. As the sugar snaps grew, they obscured it from view - but now it's put on an amazing growth spurt, towered above the peas and broken into flower.

Elsewhere I have a parsnip that was sown in March 2010 - not eating this one was intentional when I happened upon the tip that parsnip flowers attract hoverflies. So I saved my last parsnip, moved it into the broad bean bed and waited. Well, the parsnip certainly flowered on its 5 foot stem, but I've yet to see any hoverflies around it yet. However, it does seem to be acting as a sacrificial plant - simply covered in blackfly while there are none on the broad beans. I guess if the result is the same, then the method isn't that important.