The Allotment has nearly had a clean shave

*googles veet, doesn’t terribly like the sound of it *

Are there any humorous stories on the web about men using veet?

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There also appear to be quite a few (like, billions) of youtube links but I don’t fancy clicking on them seeing as my kids use my ipad and I don’t want nutsack vids popping up in between Peppa Pig and Octonauts

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Oh dear. I seem to have derailed what was surely a perfectly wonderful thread about allotments, and the many joys they hold.

As you were, eh ?

PS ‘thanks’ for all the PM’s with instructive videos of how you take care of your shaving isues.

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Google Photos

Google Photos

Sweet pear, mandarin, and pineapple for cross-border starters?

Picking our early cauliflowers

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Nice one are they polytunnel?- Mine are very small despite being in the greenhouse since last year.

The garlic and broad beans are going very well though.


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For the early cauliflowers I grow Aalsmeer. I sow them indoors in April / May and plant out in July / August where I leave them to over winter. It takes a really hard winter to worry them.

This means they only need protection against cabbage white for the early months and then they are bug free.

You harvest from late March to early May.

My broad beans are way behind yours but I only plant them late as I’m a lazy bugger who doesn’t like crawling about in the cold.

The cabbage / sprout / cauliflower main crop are ready to go in,Beetroot well up, parsnips and leeks too.

And we are picking our first strawberries in the greenhouse.

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Tomatoes (Money Maker, Roma, San Marzano, plus a couple of unknown cherry breeds) have been in the greenhouse for a fortnight and chilli (Paper Lantern, Fatalii, Orange Habanero, Trinity, Devil’s Rib) plants are now in there too as of Saturday.

Last Summer seems to have affected the apple tree. No blossom yet. We’ll see.

Almost everything planted now just the beans and sweet corn to do in a couple of weeks.

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Is it just me, or is that a lot of chilis?

This year I am growing 6 cayenne peppers and 2 jalapeño.

They freeze well so I aim to have enough green, red and dried for the year. The dried reds look good when they are hung around the kitchen and then stored in a jar.

The problem with the really hot ones is judging how much to use.

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Jalapenos I use in large quantities, both for cooking or raw (salads, salsas, taco topping). But I buy hotter on an as needed basis, I simply wouldn’t make use of a large store of them.

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If you do fancy drying them wait until they are red and thread a needle and cotton through the stem, tie a loop and hang over a window until they’ve dried. They look good and can be picked off as needed.

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Btw, the mesh covering the raised beds is the stuff contractors use along roads to stop wildlife getting killed. It keeps the cabbage whites off but let’s light and rain through. So no pesticides used other than slug killer and the mesh keeps the birds and hedgehogs off.

Really tough and can be stored and used for years.

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I meshed my blackberries one year with chicken wire (the smallest gauge that I could easily get). The aim was to keep the birds off until I’d had first pick of the berries. But what happened was that some insect must have been able to get through and, in the absence of predation early in the season by the birds, lay loads of eggs. The result was that there were loads and loads of grubs in the berries. So I stopped the meshing and I now get maybe one or two grubs per pound of berries. If I dump the fresh-picked berries in a bowl of water (not too cold as that seems to paralyse the grubs) the little blighters come wriggling out and I can deal with them. I dealt with the berry losses to the birds by letting the bushes grow bigger, so there are plenty of berries for both of us now. It doesn’t stop the odd bird from dumping deep purple droppings on the car or the laundry though.

VB

I never put mesh the blackberries, we get enough to share with the main attackers, the blackbirds. They eat the bugs too so good result.

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Very much a beginner on allotment gardening but our patch is getting closer to full - Sweetcorn from greenhouse planted out today with Parsnip, leeks , beetroot seeds all sprouting. Most of the potatoes seem to be recovering from the light frost last week. The peas and broad beans are doing very well

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I had an allotment many years ago when I lived up in that London. We have a small garden now but manage to grow a few things.

Today we got runners in and sweet pots in the bags in front.

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