Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 18th August: The sweetcorn is swelling fast and fingers are crossed that we get to them before the badgers find them.
Most of the week was really warm and so the fabulous downpour of rain during the early hours of Friday morning was most welcome, and enough for us not to have to water at all on Saturday morning, therefore saving us a good deal of time.
At last the hedge got the tidy up we had on our list of tasks for several weeks, and much neater it looks for it too. It is always the case that jobs have to be prioritised, and this one kept being pushed back every week in favour of watering, planting and sowing seeds.
Many winter radish, mustards, and overwintering onions got sowed this week. This is the first time we will have tried sowing onions for growing on over the winter, and is in place of buying onion ‘sets’ which are small bulb onions planted in October/November to harvest in July. Seeds are much cheaper to buy than the sets, and it will be interesting to see the results and if we think it was a worthwhile thing to do. We have always grown spring onions over the winter and they have always been most successful, cropping early in the spring.
We planted out a few mustard plants we were given, and the first of our Chinese cabbage plants. Chinese cabbages rely on plenty of water to get growing at the speed they like to grow, and so we will have to concentrate on watering them as often as we can.
We have mentioned many times the slipper gourds we are growing from the Nepalese community simply because they are new to us and they are most interesting as a plant. They are now starting to grow the gourds or fruits, but not in the place you would expect them to grow. The plants are flowering, but not fruiting anywhere near the flowers, and this week we have observed that the plants are attracting all sorts of different flies from hover flies to the tiny and the downright big fat whopper flies (must confess we know next to nothing about flies). They seem to find the flowers absolutely irresistible and we can only assume they have some part in the pollination, as there are no bees or wasps to be seen anywhere near them.
The sweetcorn is swelling fast and fingers are crossed that we get to them before the badgers find them. Most of the squash plants have now set their fruits and we will be interested to try out the smaller acorn squashes. Apparently they are sweeter than a butternut squash, and can be used to make deserts – so quite versatile it seems.
Just a reminder that we will not be at the garden next Saturday 24th August as we will be working hard on preparing our plants for our much awaited plant stall at the Sea Festival the following day, Sunday 25th, on the seafront. Therefore this is a final reminder to put the date in your diary to come and say hello and see if there is something we can tempt you with and take home.
What’s next?
- Really water those Chinese cabbages
- Sow some winter lettuce
- Consider protecting the sweetcorn
- Sort out which plants we are taking with us
This weeks update from the Sandgate Community Garden Diary.