Roots

Saturday afternoon wasn't too bad and we decided on a visit to the plot to do a little bit of tidying up. It was just as well we didn't take any notice of the weather forecast which was for heavy showers for most of the afternoon. We obviously missed them. We've had some rain each day now for the last week and it has started to make the allotment beds rather wet and they could do with a few days of good drying weather to get them back into shape. Although its come in bits and pieces it’s amounted to 16.2mm of rain in the last week following on from a dry start to the month.

Our experimental early potatoes planted on 10 April 2014 are just pushing their first shoots through the soil and holes in the weed control fabric.

I’ll take the precaution of moving some straw over to the bed to cover these young shoots if a frost is forecast. These are Casablanca which have beaten Rocket to be the first to show some shoots.

On the plot the last of our over wintering carrots were dug up and cleared away. Most of them only made it to the compost heap but I took pity on a few of the best looking roots and kept them for kitchen use.

We certainly can’t complain about last year’s carrot crop. Sown on 20 April 2013 we harvested our first root of Chantenay Royal by the 24 July and we've been harvesting on a regular basis all through winter. Since last July we've harvested a rather enormous 49.1kg of carrots.

Without doubt the star performer last year was Chantenay Royal producing some very large good quality roots. St Valery didn't perform as well as our other varieties and may be on a bit of a trial this year to see if it performs better but to be honest Early Nantes and Chantenay Royal have kept us well supplied in carrots for the last nine to ten months and we have a few in the freezer to help fill the gap to July. I wonder how this year’s carrots will perform.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett