This week is a busy one with lots of work visits to Chelsea flower show, so allotment activity this weekend aimed at keeping every thing going for the next 6 days. 

Transplants are being set out as fast as possible, with autumn cauliflowers, autumn and winter cabbages and savoys being planted.  This just leaves Swedes, white storing cabbage, purple cape cauliflowers  and purple sprouting broccoli to be planted in the brassica patch. 

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Allotment gardeners could hardly have asked for a better spring.  Dry, warm weather in April to get seeds in the ground and let me knock out weeds.  While rain in May gets the seedlings off to a flying start and makes life easy for transplants in their first few weeks in the ground.  Now is the time to take advantage of these conditions for the best crops later. 

Potatoes were dressed with growmore spread over the whole potato plot at 100g per square metre.  The soil between the rows was then drawn in low flat ridges around the rapidly growing potatoes mixing both fertiliser and weeds into the soil.  The growing spuds will root into this fertile damp soil and initiate many tubers in the next few weeks. 

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With mange-tout peas, spinach and spring onions at their peak it is good-bye at last to winter soups and stews.  No more peeling leeks, scrubbing parsnips and trimming wet, cold, muddy Brussels sprouts.  Instead it is stir-fries, spinach and pasta and, of course, lots of salads. 

However allotment gardeners might be thinking about next winter.  This one certainly is, and next winter's veg need attention from time to time for the next five months.  Carrots and parsnips were thinned this weekend.  More Brussels sprouts were planted.  With their long picking season sprouts are ideal for home gardens.  Storing red cabbage was planted for October cutting and storage.  The usual lime in the planting holes was used to suppress clubroot disease.  The new clubroot resistant cabbage 'Kilaxy' was planted out, without the lime, for autumn harvest.  

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This weekend transplanting began in earnest.  Sweetcorn raised in modules was planted out in a square pattern marked out last month.  In the intervening period the weeds have grown, but the area was treated with glyphosate weedkiller last weekend and the weeds are clearly on the way out.  As this weedkiller is inactivated by the soil it is quite safe to plant. 

French bean plants were set out between the sweetcorn plants. 

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