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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
