The even newer good, bad and ugly of growing your own in 2021!

bluesooz

Have sown tomatoes, greenhouse cucumbers and some basil  (I succumbed to the recommendations on here and bought some sungold tomatoes) and have potted on little gem lettuce, red cabbage and chili plants.

Purple sprouting just starting to 'sprout'  so will have to keep an eye on it for the first harvest soon.  

has any one grown edamame beans?  I grow broad beans successfully and freeze plenty to eat during the year but wondered how similar/different the edamame ones are

carinjo

9am on allotment. Managed one spade width row of digging and it came tipping down out of nowhere! Harvested a few rhubarb, from the back plot. Think i've had it once since i lived here, so fingers crossed the recipe i found will help me to fall in love with it!
Started on putting the greenhouse together again, first tomatoes seeds have germinated!

the_cross_rabbit

spent a happy 20 minutes thinning the various seedlings, hopefully will be able to pot them on next week
CRx

Suffolk_lass

carinjo said:

9am on allotment. Managed one spade width row of digging and it came tipping down out of nowhere! Harvested a few rhubarb, from the back plot. Think i've had it once since i lived here, so fingers crossed the recipe i found will help me to fall in love with it!
Started on putting the greenhouse together again, first tomatoes seeds have germinated!

Try mixing it with strawberries in desserts (especially those winter ones that are often yellow stickered in the supermarket and taste of not much unless you cook them - rhubarb picked young, cut short, mixed with strawberries, covered in crumble mix (proportion 3,2,2 of flour, fat, sugar with a pinch of salt) 180c for 25-30 minutes.

All my tiny tomato seedlings survived their first night in the unheated greenhouse and all look at lot healthier now they are out of the kitchen. Somehow no longer leggy and spindly but mostly because I buried the stems to make more roots.

I'm going to repot my aloe vera to get it in a smaller pot (so separate the bigger plants and pot the small ones into a 10cm pot so they don't take up so much space) - I promised some to a neighbour, and the pot of hollyhock seedlings need moving too.

Four tiny two-leafed jalapeño chillies are showing in the kitchen, and sweetpea shoots are just pushing through in the greenhouse. Nothing happening with garlic and onion sets or broad-beans in the ground though

Suzie_Hall

Suffolk_lass said:

Four tiny two-leafed jalapeño chillies are showing in the kitchen, and sweetpea shoots are just pushing through in the greenhouse. Nothing happening with garlic and onion sets or broad-beans in the ground though

I'm tempted to grow jalapeño chillies so would be keen to hear how these go.

carinjo

Thanks for the recipe @Suffolk_lass! When you say pick them when they young, roughly how long is that? The bit i read is when the stem between 23-30cm. Does that include the inedible leaf part?

Suffolk_lass

carinjo said:

Thanks for the recipe @Suffolk_lass! When you say pick them when they young, roughly how long is that? The bit i read is when the stem between 23-30cm. Does that include the inedible leaf part?

It sort of depends on how much you have. And no, just the stems - I like it longer and thinner and so forcing encourages this. By young, I mean really still quite pink stalks with a little bit of still furled leaf. My Mum's (in Scotland) is apparently growing really well already whereas here in the east I have one clump of early and other than that, three small pink lumps!

I "force" some of mine by putting an upside down 60cm tall flower pot with no bottom over the clump with the first pink shoots. Then when is is about 45cm tall I pick a few - the "rule" is to always leave two shoots on each bit of root clump or you weaken it too much - and pull from near the base don't cut it (then cut the leaf off). Rhubarb is quite greedy but if you spread farmyard manure round it to feed it, be careful not to cover the crowns and make sure you use manure that is really well rotted (I burned some of mine two years ago and it is still grumpy).

carinjo

Thanks for the explanantion @Suffolk_lass.
Tried to get the herb bed finished after work yesterday, started drizzling again. But saw 2 onions sticking their little green shoots through the soil!
Moved the tomato seeds onto the newly finished bedroom windowsill. The first aubergine germinated too! 
Been testing the plastic greenhouse temperature, went down to 0C last night, too cold for any seedlings yet.

droopsnoot

I've just re-potted three of my pepper seedlings, in case they come to anything. Now I'm trying to clear out all the random little growths from the vegetable plot as a decent starting point, but it's taken me ages just to do about a third of the cold frame area. 

Pennysmakepounds

I'm having a HUGE issue with mice/rats again this year too, they are digging up all my seeds/seedlings.
I have planted some peas outside and they were just about germinating and then WHAM..one night the whole patch has been dug up.
Not sure what to do about it, it was even protected under a  poly tunnel, but alas they dug in under the lining and got it and destroyed the whole lot.  Looks like ill be re-planting it again this week and adding the traps i have ordered on-line.