Reach For The Sky

Potatoes of the "Alouette" variety, French for Skylark

Whoosh! Everything has shot up. The last two weeks of May has been warm and wet and all the plants on my land, both wild and tame, have reacted by reaching for the sky. Grass that was recently an inch high is now over a foot. Docks, nettles, brambles, and bracken are all exerting their dominance over the local landscape, making once easily-navigable routes rather more vexing.

In my garden, rows of lettuce have bloomed into young adulthood, having mostly escaped the risks of slug-kill in their infancy. Runner beans are wrapping their tendrils around the wild-harvested bamboo canes, and the climbing french beans aren't far behind. The hours of painstakingly planting out beetroot seedlings are paying off, as they are mostly settling in now and enlarging.

The outdoor mange-tout are flowering, whilst the polytunnel mange-tout are naturally further ahead, producing delicious pods. Chard leaves are becoming ready to pick, if a little slug-eaten. Kale plants are bedding in, only recently having been popped in the ground. Onions are slender stalks still but noticeably wider than before. Leeks are still much thinner. Some of the rhubarb is producing nice fat stalks, others have become much thinner and limper unlike last year's miraculous crop of wonder-rhubarb, possibly due to me picking it too far into the summer.

Sadly several of my young cabbage plants have been killed by the maggots of cabbage root fly. The leaves go droopy and discoloured - dig it up and you find the stem just detaches from the roots which are crawling with wriggly white maggots. I had covered the cabbages with mesh netting but too late I guess. The latest batch I planted out yesterday I covered immediately.

And where are my carrots? I sowed an entire 10 metre bed in April and there's barely a sprig anywhere. My suspicions lie with, yes again, the slugs. They nibble on the new growth. Perhaps they don't intend actually to murder my carrots. But I'll get them on a charge of carrot-slaughter.

The veg bag scheme begins this week! Tomorrow I'll be finding out what the other growers have to offer on Wednesday, and making up the spreadsheet which describes what each bag will contain. (Not all bags are the same due to the varying amounts of different types of veg that come in, but the job is to make them all equivalent.) On Wedneday afternoon the first bags will be available for customers to collect. Sign up here, there's still time!

Broad beans are beginning to produce tiny pods from the lowest flowers