Tuesday 21 April 2015

Carrot Preparations

After a bit of a cloudy morning the sun came out before lunch time to give us a lovely sunny and mild afternoon.

On the plot it was a case of preparing a bed ready to sow our carrots and parsnips. Parsnip seed is especially good at blowing about in any sort of breeze so a reasonably calm day makes sowing so much easier.
Our carrot and parsnip bed is one of the untidiest looking beds on the plot with weed control fabric that’s in something like its fourth year of use together with all the bits and pieces of timber required to hold it in place it looks a bit of a mess. I remember thinking the same last spring but we managed to harvest 35kg (77 lb) of carrots and 15kg (33 lb)of parsnips so I’m happy to put up with it looking a mess if we get the same results. Next job is to sow the seeds and erect our environmesh cage to keep our carrots free from carrot fly. 

I blogged last week that our Delsanne pear tree was flowering before our other two varieties. That’s not the case any more as Invincible and Red Williams have joined it in flower. There were plenty of bees doing their bit so hopefully we’ll have some pears this year.
Our tulips are putting on a decent show too.

4 comments:

  1. Wow, that's a mass of pear blossom. Let's hope there's a big harvest this year. I've sowed loads of carrots but I've a feeling they're not going to germinate. Possibly the seed wasn't fresh enough. I'm very envious of your 77lb of carrots, that's very impressive indeed.

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  2. Our carrots and parsnips have been sown today. Loads of time to resow carrots. We've had a decent crop sowing seeds in June - supposedly to avoid carrot root fly. They would have been better sown under environmesh though. Its hard to believe all that pear blossom and no fruit. Fingers crossed.

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  3. flipping heck 77lb of carrots that`s some crop sadly the root fly got mine, containers for me this year

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  4. It's supposed to have been the best year in a long time for blossom - a combination of nice days and cool nights (which preserves the blossom apparently). Luckily it does seem to be a good spring for bees, I've seen more this week than seemingly the whole of last year, perhaps the mild winter helped.

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