Hardening Off

I have been hardening my tender veg out all week, and I am planning to plant some of them out this weekend. That may seem rather rushed, but my logic is that it has been as warm outside the greenhouse this week as it was inside last week, so the plants won't have noticed much difference. Tonight is the first night out in the open though. The only slight problem is that the psb is still sprouting, and is where the tomatoes are going to go. Normally it would all have been over and pulled out by now. I think the tomatoes can wait another week or two, whereas the sweetcorn....


is getting a bit desperate. See how much healthier the plants grown in pots are, compared with the toilet roll grown ones. I think this has convinced me not to bother with toilet rolls again. I know it's all green and good recycling, but they are more use chucked straight into the compost. It gets worse when you plant them out as well, as the cardboard decomposes, the plants go even yellower. I will be adding lots of well rotted chicken poo to the soil before planting, which I have been saving for just this reason.



This is the Stevia (the sugar substitute herb) which is starting to do quite well. I'm going to try cooking some rhubarb with it at the weekend, see how it really compares to sugar.



And lastly, here are my two blueberry bushes, which I have just repotted into these terracotta pots today. The pots are lined with plastic and filled with ericaceous compost. There are quite a few flowers, but I wonder how many of them will turn into blueberries.

I have had to do a lot of watering at the allotment, we haven't had any rain here for several weeks. The rain everyone else has had has just passed us by. Consequently the soil up there has turned to dust, so fine that it repels water and I have had to go to all sorts of lengths to get the water to penetrate, eg making holes with a fork, scooping little trenches either side of the row, etc etc. It is all very time consuming, and to make matters worse, one of my water butts is now completely empty and the other isn't far off.

Last Saturday I sowed runner beans, french beans and another row of peas, all direct outside. As yet there is no sign of germination. I gave a friend a pot of french bean seeds for her birthday, which I had just sown so she could watch them germinate - that was on 5th May and apparently they have still not come up! This is not very encouraging is it? I have sown some more as I am determined to infect her with the veg-growing bug!