Raspberries

One of the jobs this week was to prune and cut back my Raspberry canes.

" Malling Jewel" "Heritage" "Autumn Bliss"

I have three varieties, "Malling Jewel" which is a summer cropper, "Heritage" and "Autumn Bliss" which crops later around autumn time as the name suggests. With the summer varieties you only need to cut back the old wood that bore fruit last year as these will not fruit again. This years crop will be from the new growth ( Suckers) which came up last year.

The Autumn varieties however need to be totally cut down to the ground as the fruit will be from this years new growth . Hopefully as the plants matures I will get have bigger and better crop each year.

Early into the spring I will apply a top dressing of a general purpose fertilizer and also a mulch of organic matter such as compost.

Sow Or Soak ????????????

I am very disappointed with my sweet peas, for some reason only 16 out of 60 have germinated. I sowed them at the end of November as per the instructions on the packet exactly as I did last year where I had a 100% germination rate. You might expect one or two to miss but roughly 75% failing to germinate is a mystery, whether it was too cold, or maybe the seed was duff?, I don't know, but I have had to purchase some more seed and start again.

The replacement seed was from Thompson & Morgan. Their instructions state you must soak the seeds overnight in warm water this differs from the Kings seed which I originally sowed as they say to sow straight into seed compost with no mention of soaking.

Apparently according to an article I read on the Internet, soaking softens the hard case of the seed, it then splits, re-hydrates which allows the seed to germinate more easily.

Another article tells you to make a nick in the seed case with a pair of nail clippers, a long laborious and very fiddly job especially if you intend to sow a large number of seeds. I have better things to do with my time than to stand there doing that.

If these do germinate, I will keep the seeds separated and see if there is any difference between the two and hopefully I will know next year whether to sow or soak!

Onions From Seed

By all accounts this is the time of year to sow onion seeds. Previously I have only use onion sets, so I thought this year I might give it a go especially when one of my neighbours gave me half a packet of seeds.


They are a variety called "Kelsae" one of the varities of onion favoured by the vegetable showmen. These showmen can grow them to a colossal size so it will be fun to see what results I obtain.













I have sown around 50 them individually into modules and have them on the windowsill where I hope they will germinate.










I have also sown a couple of other varieties, one call "Bedfordshire Champion and a red onion variety call "Red Barron". Later in the year I intend to plant out onion sets and compare the results of the two methods.

So Cold!..........

Christmas has been and gone and we are now into 2010.
I went down to have a look at the plots for the first time this year with the intentions of digging up some parsnips but with the heavy frosts we have been having recently, the ground was frozen solid so that put pay to that.

A few other brave souls had ventured down the allotment on this cold morning all seemingly, only too pleased to be out in the fresh air after been cooped up over the festive period.

The conditions and the fact that nobody seemed to be in a rush to go back home gave us the opportunity to chat for an hour or so and drink copious amounts of tea and coffee. "Hard work this allotmenteering!"