The Vegetable Patch 2024/2025

[MereDintofPandiculation]

Come and share your triumphs and failures in your vegetable plot or allotment.

April and May is the main sowing time, I find

Thank you.

Used coffee grounds are also useful for keeping slugs and snails at bay (and they help condition to soil as a bonus 😁).

I've saved enough takeaway coffee cups this week to start some beans this weekend - I like to use coffee cups as they are nice and long for bean roots, are strong enough for the job but get watered enough to tend to split easily along the side seam for planting out and can still be recycled when done, just remember to poke a few drainage holes into the bottom before sowing.

Hi all !
I'm just coming into my 4th year on my allotment (half plot in Sussex).
We've been lucky as in the rain hasn't really affected our site and the drainage is good (feel for those who are still under water). Bit of an issue for greenhouses and poly tunnels with the wind though. It's also been pretty mild.

I have Nicola and Cara potatoes in, mange tout have been in for a few weeks and are growing well as are Pak Choi which i always sow early as they always seem to bolt when it gets warm. Couple of rows of carrots just showing, Spring onions, beetroot and radish sown directly last weekend, 2 types of kale going in tomorrow.
Toms (mountain magic - blight resistant, and cherry red and yellow) been in the plastic greenhouse for a couple of weeks and are about a foot high. Need to pot on red cabbage, cabbage and sprouts tomorrow along with sunflowers and various other flowers. Resisting sowing cucumber, courgette, French and runner beans for another week or so.
I have found the copper tape works well along with beer traps.
Does anyone use the garden focussed site to plan their planting ? Its pretty good.
Looking forward to seeing how everyone's year goes 🌱

I've had a lot of luck with maincrop peas - the 6 ft plus tall ones. I sow them indoors in seed trays (the individual cell ones) and plant them out about 2 weeks later. By then they are already about 20 cm tall, they grow incredibly rapidly. Once planted out and tied up pea sticks, the slugs don't seem to be able to climb up to get to anything more than low level leaves. They are frost hardy so you can get them planted out earlier (I sow late February) which also helps as there aren't normally as many slugs around.

Up until this year, I'd also have recommended the shorter early crop peas (like Kelvedon Wonder) but those did get slugged this year. They grow a lot slower than the tall ones so seem to struggle more when a few leaves get chomped on.

Wow, that all sounds lovely!

First year growing Cara potatoes- plan to put them in tomorrow. How have you found growing them?

Well that did the trick, I sowed some more courgettes yesterday and two of the existing ones have popped out the soil today 😂

Going to plant some more butternut squash today. I forget I can risk more than one of those without getting overrun as they store so well. My peas and beans and sweetcorn are being transferred to the windowsill in the outhouse, and I'll probably sow a few more sugar snap peas.

Went to the local "Brico" (bricolage -DIY store) for more pots and compost today - and they had some veg plants!! Not brilliant, but I got a tomato, pepper and chilli plant so I can jump ahead a bit 😁 as I needed to resow seeds.

Also got my bamboo canes for beans and some shorter supports for the peas to climb a foot - I'll add bamboo canes if they are climbing ones but I think they're dwarf.

Munched a couple of salad leaves for lunch 🥗 😁

We've just rearranged the side of the garden we use for growing. Dh has moved the greenhouse to a sunnier spot (bad move imho. South facing back garden). He's just replaced our rotten wooden pallet beds with concrete blocks. Filling bed no. 2 and 3 up today, and some small bees or wasps were starting to fly around the new soil. Has anyone come across this? What do you reckon they would be? Ground bees or something? 🤔 Must admit to being a little afraid of flying things, even small things like those. Love gardening, but I'm a bit of a wet Jessie when it comes to flying stingy things.. 🙄

@Maggiethecat first time this year so fingers crossed ! They were just starting to show their heads when I popped across this weekend.
They seem to be a fairly good all rounder and hopefully blight resistant.

I am so jealous of your growing space! It looks great.

It's back to 5 degrees, wind and hail interspersed with sunshine but managed to clear about a quarter of the dandelions that have appeared in the last couple of weeks at the weekend. Potatoes are now in the ground.

Hoping for some more settled weather later in the week so I can tackle the rest. Wheelbarrow is holding up the fence so need to go down with tools and try and bodge something.

Bookmarking. Nothing happening here as we've just moved so I may try some plants in pots and a make shift greenhouse till next year when we start on the garden. Looking forward to everyone else's posts however.

Not much going on in the allotment - just the first round of spring onions growing nicely.

Everything else is still seedlings on the windowsill/heat mat/under lamps. Though I received a 'reminder' how closely you have to watch it all. I blinked and 2/6 of my Apache seedlings have dried up and wilted. Not a terrible loss as I still have 10 healthy chilli seedlings left. But still...

I am trying pre-germinating carrots and parsnips on tissue this year. The carrots have germinated so they need to go in the ground tomorrow. They are so small it's going to be a fiddly job! The parsnips have not germinated yet but are much bigger seeds so hopefully, if they do germinate, they will be easier to handle.

@Lakeyloo - put mine in at the weekend so hoping they’ll come good.

Have some earlies in bags so should get something!

Main crop potatoes are just peaking out of the soil and red onions seem to be ok. All the sunflowers have been eaten by mice though and the sweetpeas are very sad looking.

I can't seem to grow parsnips. Or sunflowers. Unless they self-seed of course. These 'so easy that a child can grow them' plants seem to defeat me every year.

Or sweet peas, come to think of it!

Where do you all buy your seeds from and how on earth do you pick which varieties to grow?

So far I've mainly sown flowers but I have 8 cherry tomato plants growing nicely in the conservatory. This is our first year with a garden big enough to grow veg. I'm still trying to decide which to grow but courgettes, squash and french beans are some of our most frequently eaten veg.

I get mist of my seeds from the Kings Seeds scheme run by our allotment society and the rest in garden centres, we have several good ones that I can get to quite easily.

Yes there is such a huge choice of seeds that it's hard to know where to start! Trial and error is probably the most common way to decide what to grow... But there are some ways to narrow it down. F1 varieties of seeds have often been bred to grow well in the UK, for example. Gardening magazines will often include free seeds, which is another way to try a variety. But recommendations from other local veg growers is probably the easiest way.
For french beans, I normally grow a variety called Blue Lake. Courgettes, I find yellow difficult to grow, but green ones are very productive in my soil (clay). I'm growing one called Midnight this year. Squash has been a failure in general for me, but I'm going to have another go at Uchiki Kuri. Whether or not you have a greenhouse is another important factor... I don't have one unfortunately. You can always buy seedlings from the garden centre to get a head start. It seems complicated when you first start out but you soon get the hang of it.

I thought I was high up enough, but pigeons attacked my bean seeds yesterday while I was at work - they hadn't even sprouted yet! Netting is next on my list of jobs!

@cointos You can select seeds with AGM after their name - Award of Garden Merit, issued by the Royal Horticultural Society after growing trials. They’ll look for things like robust growth, resistance to pests, good reliable cropping.

I’d always go for climbing French beans rather than dwarf - anything to make life harder for snails. Blue Lake is a lovely climbing bean with good flavour. I usually grow Cobra.

Read the descriptions and match them up with your conditions. For example, I don’t need a variety that can crop well in drought, but I do need reliable cropping, compact plants, crop well in shade, resistant to slugs. And grow for fun as well as produce - eg add a red-flowered broad bean to the ones you usually grow, grow rainbow chard, a mixture of red, orange, yellow and white stems instead of just white stemmed Swiss chard. Seeds last several years, so it doesn’t have to be more expensive to have fun.

Thanks for the advice. I had started looking at real seeds but they don't have F1 or AGM varieties. As a newbie it sounds like I might be better off with the hybrid varieties for now.

Good to know about the taller French beans. There are so many slugs out already with all this wet weather.

I'll try some yellow courgettes and not expect too much. They just look so pretty mixed in with the green ones. I also need to hunt down some Middle Eastern courgettes. A former colleague from Syria gave me some a couple of years ago and they really lovely. Actually, I better get in touch and ask her what they were to save any disappointment.

Real Seeds concentrate on maintaining heritage varieties which have fallen out of cultivation, which is why no F1 or AGM.

Go with one of the mainstream suppliers, or try Chiltern, for the first couple of years till you know what you like and what the particular problems of your garden are.