Since it wasn't raining on Tuesday evening

... we went up to the allotment. I planted some extra tomato seedlings and two tiny capsicum seedlings in the greenhouse. The direct sown tomato plants are doing quite well. Also, the cape gooseberries in the other greenhouse are ticking along nicely and ONE soya seed has come up!

I very thickly sowed two rows of soya seeds, which had been soaking in a beer glass for two days, down from where the kidney beans are. This is their absolutely last chance before I reluctantly give up on soya beans!

In the meantime, The Builder was constructing a trellis for me, made from bamboo canes, on the next bed down. Along this trellis I have planted two cucumber plants (one with a tiny cucumber already forming!), five pumpkin plants, two melon plants and one zucchini plant. If the rest of the zucchini seeds and the watermelon seeds come to anything, I shall plant them on the alternate posts, which have been left empty. This will make for a very crowded cucurbit bed, but I'm sure they'll sort it out.

And I think I have worked out why our brassicas haven't been doing very well for the last couple of years. I was watching a DVD on growing vegetables from Heligan. The gardener there (surrounded, it must be said, by MAGNIFICENT cabbages and kale and broccoli and sprouts) was saying that they should be grown in small pots, then planted as you were lifting the potatoes later in the summer, into ground which has been trodden down hard (I knew about the hard ground bit) because the potatoes have used most of the nitrogen which had been fixed by the legumes previously, leaving just enough to keep the brassicas growing. Too much nitrogen and fertiliser - and you get blowsy, leafy, useless plants which don't flower, fruit or heart. And where have I been planted my brassicas? Between the rows of peas and beans to keep the pigeons off them. It has worked from the point of view of keeping the pigeons off - but has most certainly led to blowsy, leafy, useless plants which haven't flowered, fruited or hearted! I can do brassicas in pots until the potato beds are ready!! I shall get to it this weekend.

We had our first serve of potatoes from the garden yesterday. They were some of the Salad Blue potatoes we planted in the potato bins. They are almost black - and an iridescent, speckly purple inside. I'm not sure quite how to cook them, though. They are a floury potato which I suspect will disintegrate when boiled (although they are apparently extremely good mashed - not sure how you get them to get soft enough to mash!) I roasted them and they were extremely delicious. Although they did go a little way to support Paul's largely discredited theory that humans find it instinctively difficult to eat "blue" food. They did look a little as though they had gone off or were poisonous

Here are my bean plants. And the Under-gardener: