The Veg Plot.

[redtrummy]

Where is that ruddy dog?

[garynortheast]

In the gutter! Took me a little while to spot it.

[DarrenSV650S]

haha I don't know why, but it just jumped out at me as soon as I looked at that picture.

Leering down from the rooftop...

[Seeker]

"Romanesco" aka Fractal Broccoli. I was asking for broccoli at my local greengrocer and he said he had some but it was "extortionate". Since I had no idea how much non-extortionate broccoli costs, I bought some. Meanwhile he had fetched a "Romanesco" and offered that instead of the broccoli, it looked so weird and alien I bought one. It's a cross between broccoli and cauliflower.
https://www.healthbenefitstimes.com/romanesco-broccoli/

[garynortheast]

The Romanesco is very nice. I grew some a couple of years back.

[garynortheast]

Bought and planted my bare root apple tree yesterday. It's a cooker, a Bramley's Seedling.





The tree will be trained as an espalier. Once it's established the branches on the left hand side will be removed and two or three buds from a Cox's Orange Pippin will be grafted on to the main stem. The idea is to have cookers on trained branches on the right, and eaters on the left.

One of today's jobs will be to drill holes on the concrete posts of the fence, rawlplug them, and fit threaded steel eyes to feed the training wires through.

[redtrummy]

I need a new cooker - the one we have got is of a very good age and the tree is full of Canker, and its growth each year is aggressive to say the least

[garynortheast]

In my old garden I had a couple of eating apple trees and a cooker. The two eaters (a Fiesta and a Russet) were riddled with canker but they still kept producing lots of apples every year. I think there would have come a point though, if I'd been able to stay there, at which both trees would have had to come out and be replaced.

[garynortheast]

I've just succumbed and bought one of these heated propagators to stand on my window sill. I need something to get my chilli and bell pepper seeds going.

The garden is slowly coming to life. My purple sprouting brocolli is developing nice heads and lots of side shoots, and all my garlic is now starting to come through at last. I have various seed trays, pots, and propagators on window sills, and a box of Sturon onion sets to plant out as soon as possible. The rhubarb in the ground is coming through so I've put a bucket over it to force it for some of those lovely early, sweet, pink stems. The other rhubarb in the pot is showing too, so I must find it a permanent home this spring.

I'm off the the Shropshire Organic Gardeners potato day in just over a week to get my seed potatoes. It's a really nice event, 45 varieties of seed potato, many of them organic, on sale, along with garlic, onion sets, bare root fruit trees, fruit bushes, and rhubarb crowns. There are two places there selling food as well, one doing cooked breakfasts and sausage baps, the other doing tea, coffee, and cake, with vegan options at both. A very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, buying stuff for the fruit and veg plot and then sitting down with a paned a chacen.

[Sir Trev]

My Desiree seed spuds arrived via mail order (Suttons) last week, along with some Sturton onion sets. I'll wait until mid-March or so before planting out the onions but will probably kick start some in modules a few weeks earlier. Mid-April is when I usually plant out the potatoes but we'll see what the weather doing nearer the time.