The weather has been pretty good the past few days and the soil has warmed up. My early potatoes continue to sprout rapidly so I've been earthing them up to avoid any frost damage though it's been above above freezing for a while now.
I decided to put some carrots on the plot this week. My clay soil is awful for carrots and I seldom get anything worth shouting about. This year I wanted to try a different method so, to start with, I've bought some decent carrot seed. The seed is Sweet Candle F1, a blunt ended carrot that can win a vegetable show and will still taste great on the the plate.
To try and overcome the problem of a heavy soil I have used a bar to create a decent size conical hole, a few inches apart. I'm not sure how deep the holes should be so I hammered the bar into the ground around a foot and a half deep, the depth of my top soil before it starts to go to clay.
To half a bucket of light compost I added a couple of trowels of sharp sand to aid drainage and some general fertilizer. After a really good stir I back-filled the holes with the mix, effectively creating growing tubes. On top if each position I sowed three Sweet Candle seeds and will reduce to one plant. If germination is poor I'll re-show with more seed. No idea if this will work but the results will be seen later in the year. As a comparison I also created a dozen newspaper tubes, filled them with the same compost and sowed with the same seed. I'll plant each tube, paper and all, when they sprout.
Along side the carrots I prepared another strip by forking over and raking the soil to a decent tilth. While I'm not a great beetroot fan, I do like pickled beetroot, especially at Christmas. I sowed a row of Detroit beetroot and intend to pick them relatively small though last year I forgot about them and they became too large and woody - I still pickled and ate them though.
Bye for now ...
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