wrote in
:

Baz wrote:
Went out this morning as it is the only dry and frost free day for
weeks to

I walked over to the allotment for the first time for, umm, over a
month today. I will try and get out there for an hour or two tomorrow
if the weather is the same tomorrow.

have a bit of a dig around some root veg. The tops of the parsnip,
carrot and swede all went rotten but to my amazement I have a barrow
more than half full of them.

We still have half a plot of potatoes ocha to search for!

The carrots Autumn King are impressive in size though cracked so I
don't think they will save very well, which is a pity because this is
the first time with no fly.

How did you manage to keep the fly off? I am going to try and make an
effort to grow things that we will be more likely to use this year,
I'm sick of growing things that go to waste! So more carrots (never
had a good enough crop to make use of them - so need to grow /more/ so
that when half of them fail it doesn't matter!) and more broccoli, and
more effort into the cauliflower, as they never do well, but I really
like romanesco caulis!

Quite pleased overall as I thought I had lost the lot to frost as the
brussels sprouts an cabbage went.

My brussel sprouts never got over 6" tall. :-( The bloke on the next
plot has these huge plants with giant sized sprouts, and we've got
nothing bigger than a pea

Soon be time to start sowing and planting again in this lucky dip we
call gardening.

I have a Plan this year - more concentration on the essentials, less
faffing about with the fippery.


Question. What in hell is or was fippery?

I kept the fly of the carrots by constructing a frame of timber and
cladding it with polythene. It works fine. You have to make sure that you
bed it all in, by that I mean between the frame and the soil there are no
gaps. There are sceptics but I have carrots, OK not perfect, far from it,
but I have them fly free.

Lets hope your potatoes are deep enough to escape the frosts you had in
your area.

Its a differing tale about our harvests this year, some people have had a
success and others a failure with various things. I could spit sometimes
when I hear what other people have. I think this is my 4th year comming
up at trying to grow veg and wish I had done it years before.

I havn't done the maths but after buying seeds, compost and every other
thing a gardener has to buy, the crop has cost me more than in the
supermarkets. That expense is nothing when you taste the produce grown by
yourself and see the grandkids willingly tucking in. Priceless.

Anyway enough faffing and fippery from me now.
(does this mean farting around?)
Baz