I know that we should not rely too much on generic scientific research because each garden has a unique soil and microclimate.  However, to be able to promote companion planting as part of a wider organic more natural way of gardening, we do need some base to work from.  I would like to say that this method could be used in all growing situations but this is difficult to do without some prestigious research.

I think that every gardener that uses companion planting must have seen some effect and anecdotal evidence is as valid as any other.  Yet, I would conjecture that it may not work in all cases and this would make some people suggest that it does not work in any. 

My worry was that everyone was just copying tables throughout the internet without really trying things out.  They all seemed to be so similar.  If someone has just made them up as they went along then we are basing our gardening on very weak foundations. 

I am also looking into the research on using mychorrhizal fungi and there does seem to be more research in this area.  Its potential to reduce the amount of fertilizer use is immense. 

God does work in mysterious ways I think…�

The interesting thing about trying to garden with a little more intelligence than it previously required means that you find out fairly obvious things that really you should have thought about before.  Companion planting, it is suggested, helps other plants to grow with a little more vigour.  How this occurs is not always spelt out and probably has not been fully investigated.  We just have not really needed to know because we could slap on several nasty chemicals so that the plants could survive without the help of other plants.  Now that we cannot get lots of these chemicals we have to look at other methods of controlling pests and diseases in crop plants.  Companion planting must be a method of gardening that is ripe for serious research but in lieu of this there must be enough anecdotal evidence to convince people, that would like to garden with the help of nature, that there may be something here.  It costs nothing to a good grower except a few packets of seeds. 

If we accept that this could be a good way of growing, then it might bring with it other benefits.  We avoid the monoculture of growing the same plants close together.  Anyone in the
UK will tell you that their brassicas have been devastated this year with cabbage white butterfly caterpillars.  Maybe if I had put some companion plants between them, there would not have been such a problem.  What we are looking at is a more cottage garden type of planting system that allows flowers and vegetables to be interplanted. 

From my experience with tagetes this year I would suggest that there is a benefit to growing onions interspersed with it.  Grow the small French marigolds rather than the big African ones because some of the onions got a little shaded out this year.  So is this due to exudates from the roots of plants?  Is it due to their pungent smell?  Is there some other effect that might be coming into play?  I don’t know. 

If we are actively trying to improve the fauna and flora of the soil, a companion planting system may attract a more diverse range of organisms, which would encourage a more natural food chain.  If we add to this mychorrhizal fungi and allow an even more intimate soil community to develop then we may well achieve a more fertile response from the soil.  Using this fungus with green manures may also help to lock nutrients into the soil. 

The fragility of the mychorrhizal fungi is evident by their scarcity in our soils.  I sometimes see them around weed plants like dandelions but rarely anywhere else.  I am going to use dandelions as a companion plant next year. 

The comfrey plants on the allotment are going to be replanted during the winter and they will get a good dose of these fungi together with the moved rhubarb. 

A further advantage of using companion plants is that they attract insects that may predate garden pests.

To continue…

There are many sites that are really good at suggesting a variety of different plants for companion planting.  I have no idea if they work or not but I am going to check them out.  These plants are also good for introducing mychorrihizal fungi into the soil.  So if they are grown from seed in the greenhouse then pricked out with fungi, they can be planted in the garden next to vegetables or flowers. 

Possible advantages of companion planting.

• Plants that produce pest controlling chemicals either from their leaves or roots.  These could include tagetes and the herb plants.
• Plants that form a particularly good association with mychorrhizal fungi and will enable the fungi to form an association with crop plant roots. 
• Plants which have flowers that attract insect preditors such as hoverflies and lacewings. 
• Plants that could also act as annual or perenial green manures such as comfrey, nettle and sweet cicely and also do some of the above. 
• Plants that just make the allotment more attractive.   

I am going to list them here mainly as an aid memoir.

• Yarrow
• Monkshood (Aconitum)
• Bugle (Ajuga reptans)
• Borage - possibly with strawberries and pumpkins.
• Dill (Anethum gravellens) particularly with cabbage, lettuce and carrots.
• Chamomile (Anthemis) I grew this this year and will grow it again.  In some books it describes chamomile as the “doctor plant.”   Did well with my onions.  Also with cabbages.
• Chives around the base of fruit trees.
• Flax with carrots and potatoes.
• Hyssop with potatoes and grapes.
• Marogolds (Tagetes) It is really the main pest deterrent.  It suposedly keeps the soil free of nematodes, discourages many soil insects and looks quite good too. 
• Nasturtium with radish, cabbage, cucumber, fruit trees, and all the curbits.
• Petunia is good with beans.
• Rosemary is good with carrots, beans and cabbage.
• Columbine (Aquilegia)
• Pot Marigold (Calendula officinalis) Grew this this year and need to make sure that I give room to it.  It can shade out low growing vegetables.   
• Crocus.  I have just planted some in the allotment - without realising their potential.  They have been planted with mychorrhizal fungi.  I also planted grape hyasinth and snowdrops (Galanthus.)
• Californian Poppy (Eschscholzia californica)  This was planted and seemed to have an effect.  It is not a really long lasting plant and goes over very quickly. 
• Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare).  I don’t have any fennel at the moment but I might plant some next year. 
•  Hardy Geranium and Crainesbill.  I think I get these as weeds on the allotment. 
• Candytuft (Iberis) 
• Dead nettle (Lamium) with potatoes
• Lavender.   I grow this at home so it will not be a great problem to put them onto the allotment. 
• Poached-egg plant (Limnanthes douglasii) Now of all the companion planting this year, I think that this was the least sucessful.  It was planted under the apple tree but even so it could have made a better effort.  The upsetting and irritating thing is that it flowered for years alongside my allotment as an escape from one of the gardens.  Not on my allotment though. 
• Lobellia
• Honeysuckle
• Poppy (Papaver)
• Phacelia tanacetifolia
• Primulas
• Lungwort(Pulmonaria) This is growing alongside my allotment on the trackway. 
• Sedum
• Golden rod (Solidago)
• Periwinkle (Vinca) I have both the varigated and the wild one in my garden. 
• Dandilion is not usually included in the lists I have seen but I have dug up long taproots this year covered in mychorrhizal fungi.  
• Grass ?  I have just been weeding and a lot of the grass has mychorrhizal fungi growing on their roots. 

More information but without research evidence Tone:

http://juliesedwick.com/CPG1.aspx

 I don’t really mind if these plants do not have any affect on the vegetables in the allotment.  If I do interplant next year, they will brighten up the allotment a little.   

I got down to the allotment on Sunday afternoon.  I took down the lawn cuttings and put them in the double digging trench.  Nearly the whole allotment site has taken down their runner beans now so I decided to do the same.  The tops went into the trench as well.  All the canes and the supports went into the greenhouse.  There were no more flowers on them and all that were left were the old beany beans that I had missed on previous picking.   The pumpkins were making a nuisance  of themselves because they had grown through the beans.  They are not very large ones, most being about the size of  a football, but there are one or two that have grown beach ball size.  Now all we have to do is eat them.  I might make pumpkin pie or soup with them and then freeze it.  It is always a good standby for the winter. 

I cleared the area where the radish, rocket and spinach had gone to seed.  Put them all in the trench.  The Florence fennel went to seed too so I put that in as well.  Double dug another trench and was just about to start filling this one with lawn cuttings and manure left near the bottom gate when it started raining. 

This time of year the allotment can be a little disheartening because the ravages of the summer are clearly evident.  Lots of the brassicas have been well and truly eaten.  The gooseberries have lost all their leaves.  Lots of the annual companion plants have gone over and need to be taken out.  So the poor old allotment really needs a good old tidy up.  I just wish that I had the energy and the time. 

The nights are drawing in now and by the time I have organised myself to get up the allotment after work it is beginning to get very dark.  I doubt that I will be able to do anything substantial except at the weekends. 

I have really cleared the bottom third of the lower allotment except for a few more comfrey plants.  I also need to take off about seven slabs which I had carefully levelled to put my shed on.  Never mind.  I have just stacked the other slabs on the path to keep them out of the way of the JCB digger.  I don’t know when they are coming to take the soil off the allotment but they did say that it would be the end of October because we would have harvested all our crops. 

The leeks need another spraying with derris to keep off the leek fly , Napomyza gymnostoma. The leeks have got some rust on them but they are still growing very well.  If the fly stays off them they will be really big around Christmas.  I am loath to take the companion plants out around them because they seem to be protecting the leeks.  Maybe it is just my wishful thinking.  I also hope that the wet year has deterred the fly as well. 

I am going to take out the old Granny Smith apple.  I don’t really want to but it is not producing many apples and the ones I do get are mangy and moth eaten.  The Victoria plum is also going over and needs to come out.  I might give them to the November the 5th people to put on their bonfire.  I am not too happy about burning things off the allotment but they came pleading for wood for the bonfire and this was all I had to offer them.  I will not be there so I don’t mind. 

I have some black grapes.  If they fatten up any more and ripen I might get some raisin sized grapes before the end of October.  It has not been a good year for grapes.  The new strawberries seem to be doing very well.  I will move the cambridge strawberries because they will be smothered by the potatoes next year when I put them in that bed.  Also I want that room to put several piles of horse manure.  I am not too sure where to put the strawberries but they cannot stay were they are now. 

The autumn raspberries are coming with great profusion now.  As is my want, I am eating them straight from the canes.  I don’t know if you agree but I do not find them as sweet as the summer ones but beggars can’t be choosers.  I still ate them for my mid afternoon break. 

Eventually it became too miserable in the rain and I decided to call it a day and come home.  I dug up five or six pounds of carrots, washed them carefully and put them in the car for people at work.  I told them that they were organic and that they would be a little moth eaten.  The consensus seemed to be that they did not mind so they have  got some to chew the bones out of. 

Today I am having tomatoes, cucumber, marrow, beetroot, carrots, red onion, potatoes, sweet corn and white onion for my evening meal.  I am making a vegetable curry with a salad on the side.  What could be better than that?  Maybe if I had brought home a few of those autumn raspberries?

Some friends of mine are going to come down and see the allotment.  I have been telling them about it for quite some time and it is only now that they seem to be interested.  I think that it is merely the media interest in allotments that has encouraged them to make the effort. 

Interested or not, I wanted the allotment to look as good as it can do.  It is a working allotment and never looks pretty so tidying it up is the most that can be done to make it look presentable.  At least the tagetes and other annuals I have planted have begun to flower in earnest. 

 I tied up all the sweet peas and took off all the flowers that were open.  There are a lot of buds and these will come during the week.  Got a couple of pounds of runner beans off the plants and then went along the row taking out any growing points that had strayed above the canes.  I do this for several reasons.  The main one is to encourage side shoots to develop lower down the plant.  The second reason is because the plant may get top heavy if you allow the growing points to carry on growing and flopping about.  More and more growth develops at the top of the canes and the whole structure becomes  unstable.  This means that the least bit of wind will topple the canes over.   The final reason is that it is a bit of a stretch to get the beans at the top of the canes. 

I watered both the beans and the sweet peas with comfrey liquid. 

I sprayed the leeks with both liquid derris and aspirin against the leek fly.  I weeded them and hoed them up. Pulling a ridge of soil  up to them means that more of the stem will be white. 

 I have taken the enviromesh off the carrots.  Now I know that this is foolhardy and they will be infected by carrot root fly, but I am getting really irritated when I have to take off the mesh to crop the carrots and to weed. 

I took out a few of the carrots and several of the beetroot.  I washed them and took off their tops.  I see no point in taking the leaves home if you are not going to use them. 

I dug up some of the Kestrel potatoes.  There are some really big ones so I was quite pleased with that.  The potatoes are going over now and the tops are slowly turning yellow.  I will get the whole crop of Kestrel out this week.  I like to wash them before I store them.  So they will all get a quick wash before I put them into the Hessian bags. 

 There were several gooseberries still on the bushes so I stripped them off too.  I picked some lettuce, radish and rocket for salad.  A couple of the courgettes had developed so I took them home too. 

The raspberries have continued to fruit and I took home a couple of pound.  These will probably be frozen but I do enjoy eating them with yoghurt or ice cream.  The strawberries have finished now and sending out runners.  I will keep some of the runners for next year but I really need to get some more virus free plants. 

There are still no red tomatoes.  I put this down to the cold wet weather we have been having this summer.  It is a typical British weather and while the courgettes, cucumbers and tomatoes have suffered it has been great for the carrots, lettuce, peas and beans.  I don’t mind the wet weather but I think that it is time for us to have a little more sunshine and warmth. 

Lots of plants have put on phenomenal growth this past week.  The beans have covered the canes now and the plants are really bushing up.  The sweet peas have reached the top of the canes and will have to be layered soon.  The peas have overtopped their supports and the brassicas are getting enormous.�

I really think that with intelligent planning and use of natural resources, you should be able to grow without any man made chemicals at all. 

To start with most pests and diseases can be ameliorated with a battery of different natural methods. 

Aspirin is one of the main ones that I think could be good in protecting plants from disease and pests.   It certainly seems to protect roses and fruit trees against common ones.   It needs to be used sparingly but should be a part of any natural remedy chest. 

Criticism has come from the fact that aspirin is now artificially made and not extracted from the bark of the willow.  I don’t mind.  I would rather use something that has evolved in the environment for millions of years, than something that has been developed recently and not had the test of time. 

Caliente mustard must be another good natural remedy against soil pests and diseases.  It suppresses a number of soil diseases including Verticillium wilt, Pythium, Rhizoctonia, Sclerotinia, Fusarium and others. 

It also suppresses a range of soil pests like wireworm and nematodes. 

Companion planting was something that I was a little sceptical about but having used it this year I am really impressed how it has worked with some of the vegetables on the plot.  I think that you have to be careful what you plant with what then you just leave them to get on with growing. 

I think that mychorrhizal fungi are a really exciting way of increasing the health of vegetables and flowers.   They have certainly helped the peas.  I am still cropping the Kelvedon Wonder but the line that has gone over had roots covered with mychorrhiza.  I am hoping that these fungi have migrated to the apple tree.  

Nematode worms are an expensive way to control slugs and snails.  Beer traps might not be as effective but they certainly are cheaper.  The nematodes did clear the allotment of snails and slugs for about three months.  However you really need to keep applying if you want to get rid of most of them.  

Together with a few nets, meshes and fleece as a physical barrior, keeping the allotment very tidy and clean helps to keep the allotment disease free.  

If you grow vegetables that are resistant to diseases in some way then this helps a lot.  I am using disease resistant flyaway carrots, Kestrel potatoes, and Sapo potatoes because I know that, although they are relatively poorer croppers, they will produce vegetables that are pest free.    

I will be getting some more mildew resistant gooseberries.  Know your local area and the soil you are working with.  Choose varieties that will not struggle in the allotment.  Use green manure to improve the soil fertility; add nutrients; improve aeration of the soil; improve the water holding capacity of the soil and increase the growth of beneficial soil microbes.

Overuse of fertiliser only means that the surplus will leach out into water courses.  The use of cow and horse muck will need a lot of time for it to rot down and give the nutrients back to the soil.  This allows for a build up of more beneficial micro organisms.  Plants do not need a great deal of fertiliser.  The amount of NPK that they need could be supplied with comfrey liquid.  

It might be wrong – in what I say

But I keep wondering anyway.

For my 100th post I thought that I would put some photographs of the allotment on here.  Yesterday I got my first handful of beans off the Aintree runner beans.  I got a couple of buckets of sweet peas off as well.  That is why there are not many on them.   The weather is very overcast but not cold.  22^oC in the shade - not that there is much sun today.   

As you can see the allotment is beginning to become very green and there has been a lot of growth.  This lower half allotment is new this year.  I had to clear quite a lot of weed off it before I started to plant.  I double dug it all right up to the Onward peas. 

Comfrey growing well in the foreground and beans and sweet peas in the background.  You can’t see the pumpkins between the beans and the comfrey.  This is number 26. Number 25 starts by the shed. 

Carrots are under the enviromesh, beetroot next then two rows of annual flowers as companion planting. 

Then there are 10 lines of leeks interspersed with companion planting. 

You can just see the pumpkin in the foreground. 

Courgettes are big but not producing yet.  Lots of flowers but no courgettes.  Kelvedon Wonder peas are nearly finished now but you can see the Early Onward in the background starting to fruit.  Running alongside the sweet corn is a row of nigelia as a companion plant.  The shed is on Eric’s allotment not mine.  The plum tree is mine though. 

Sweet is corn growing well.

Please note that the weeds are on a public path between allotment 25 and 26.  Number 25 is my old allotment.  Behind the rhubarb there is a new blackberry plant and along the supports are a new line of raspberries.  If you look at the post that you can see going into the ground, there are two grape cuttings that are growing really well.   In the background you can see Florence fennel, radish, rocket, lambs lettuce and spinach.  There is also poached egg plant.  Not much yellow on these flowers though.   There are quite a few apples on the Granny Smith.  You can see how much I have raised the allotment using concrete slabs.  In the far background there are the brassicas.

And here they are winter cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, cabbage and broccoli.   I have left the nets over them to keep the cabbage white caterpillars off them.  I will have to drag some more soil around the stems at the weekend because they are getting quite big now and might start falling over.  I don’t really want to stake them because I have used all my stakes for the peas. 

The Sapo and Sante potatoes.  There are some Kestrel potatoes in the foreground and these are starting to go over now.  The tops look good but this is no indication of how big the potatoes are. 

The Kestrel potatoes are just going over.  I will have to start to harvest them next week.  I will plant Caliente mustard here after they have been taken out.  In the background you can just make out the blackcurrent bushes.  They have cropped very well this year. 

In the foreground are the Meteor peas that replaced the winter onions.  In the background are the onions interspersed with tagetes and a row of chamomile as companion planting. 

 

The onions are growing much better now but there is still some distortion in the foliage.  You can see two lines of parsnips in the background.  Not many weeds at the moment. 

This is what you can do with double digging, horse manure, chicken manure and comfrey liquid. 

I will be raising the new allotment up as high as the old one.  I will use turf, leaves and lawn mowings initially but will also continue to use horse and cow muck.�

I knew that there would be a lot of sweet peas because I had not cut any during the weed.  Well I filled a bucket with them.  I am getting exhibition standard blooms now but I doubt if I will show them.  I just like the fun of growing them.  They certainly smell wonderful.  The scent is everywhere in the house.  Well,  they have filled four vases. 

I took out the first row of Kelvedon Wonder peas completely.  I took the chicken wire off them last week and put it around the Meteor peas.  I gleaned the rest of the peas on this row and pulled out the plants.  The roots were all covered in nitrogen fixing nodules so I think that they have done a good job.  They have added nitrogen to the soil and I think that I have got quite a few pounds of peas off just this one row.  I have another four rows coming on well.   The rain has helped them to grow this year.  Several of the roots had mychorrhizal fungi on them so adding them to the soil seems to have done the trick.  Also I planted them directly under a small apple tree and they still did very well. 

I sprayed the onions and leeks with derris and aspirin.  They are still suffering with leek miner fly.   Tomatoes are fruiting but they are still very small.  They are in the greenhouse too so I think it is the rainy weather that is not letting them grow quickly. 

Courgettes are flowering well but the only courgette that they produced rotted. 

Several people on the allotments are taking out their early potatoes.  I was thinking of having a look at a root of Kestrel.  The tops are still very green so I think that they are still growing.  There is no sign of blight this year thank heavens.  I got a crop last year but I would not say that it was good.  Still it did last us quite a while. 

The beans are coming very well.  It will be the earliest that I have ever had runner beans.  The wet weather is to their liking I think. 

Some of the companion planting I put in is flowering now.  It looks quite good.  The convolvulus, poached egg plant and tagetes are making quite a show. 

Took a look at the grapes in the allotment greenhouse today.  There are some grapes on the black one but nothing on the white grape.  I doubt if they will ripen properly with all this rain we have been having. 

Most of the March lettuces have either been eaten or have gone to seed.  I have just started eating the April ones.  I will have to clear the seeding ones away and leave the ground to the winter cauliflowers. 

Not many plums on the plumb tree and not many apples on the apple tree.  Maybe Granny Smith was not a good choice for my allotment but Victoria plums have been very good in the past. 

The strawberries have finished more or less. However, the raspberries are certainly still producing prodigious amounts of fruit. 

Good job too because I eat so many straight off the canes.�

Thank heavens I have filled the allotment with plants now - except for the patch I am keeping for the leeks. 

I went down the allotment early again today.  Got there about 8 o’clock in the morning and set about finishing off  side shooting, tendril removing and tying up the sweet peas.  Went round and watered the sweet peas and the runner beans with comfrey liquid.  The slabs that Eric did not want were piled on the allotment and would be in the way if I did not do something with them so I decided to lay them finishing off the lower path to the edge of Mr Singh’s allotment then up the side.  I didn’t finish the path mainly because at that time I thought that they were going to remove all the top soil from the allotment and I would have to move all the slabs off so they could do it.

I finished off weeding this bed.  I have  a row of beetroot and a couple of rows of annual flowers in this part of the allotment.  The beetroot it seems is being eated by slugs and snails.  I am not sure whether this is true or not because I have never seen a slug on the beetroot.  The beetroot is growing very fast at the  moment so I am hoping that it will outgrow the  damage that the slugs are doing.  I hoed and raked the worst of this area and put the weeds into a deep hole that I dug.  There is water on this allotment because when I dug the hole water filled the bottom of it.  Looks like I will be raising this allotment too.   I put in some of the leeks that were left in the seed tray after planting out some in pots.  I will leave the rest of the area for the leeks in the greenhouse. 

I planted four rows of red onion, two rows of sets (these are ones that Dad gave me so I wanted to put them in somewhere), another row of peas, and some tagetes in the top third of the new allotment.  However half way during the afternoon the environmental health officer and the allotment officer for the council came down for the meeting about the contaminant, benzo (a) pyrene, on the allotments.  So I had to stop everything to talk to them. 

It seems to have affected Tony’s, the new bloke’s, Mr Singh’s and my  allotment.  We all had a chat and it turns out that they do not want to leave it and they really gently insisted that the soil should be removed and clean topsoil replace it. 

It is not desperate that they change the soil straight away so we asked them to leave it until the crops have been harvested and suggested that they start in November.  They were fine about this but they wanted to leave redoing the carpark and the trackways until the big JCBs and lorries had taken off the contaminated soil.  Well I have worked on my allotment for 25 years with no car park and trackways that you could not really get a car down so I can put up with a few months more. 

Went back to my planting after they left and finally filled the top third of the allotment with plants.  When I had finished this, I went up to the greenhouse which is now empty of all the rubbish I had collected over the years and decided to plant some aubergines and tomatoes.  I doubt very much if the aubergines are going to do anything remarkable because they didn’t last year.  The tomatoes may be a good idea though.  I also wanted to plant the cucumbers in the greenhouse too.  I found a couple of slugs and snails  while planting out so I am hoping that the young plants will survive.  I have this veg  in the greenhouse at home so it will not be a tragedy if the slugs do eat them but I would rather they didn’t. 

The sweet peas look as if they are going to be good this year.  I am looking forward to when they flower.

The wind was particularly strong yesterday and it was blowing about the newly planted lettuce.  Lots of them had lost some of their leaves.  The wind has died down a little now so I am hoping the lettuce is coping a little better.Yesterday I pricked out 100 leeks into 3″pots and watered them in.  I have left them in the greenhouse to grow on a little more.  I will be planting these out in June for Christmas and January, February time.  The May sown lettuce is coming along and will need planting out fairly soon.  I put two cucumbers and 8 aubergines  in large pots to grow on in the greenhouse.  The others I will take down and either put into the allotment greenhouse or outside. I decided to take the pumpkins down to the allotment with some outdoor cucumbers and the left over aubergines.  I mixed up some more aspirin with hot water and put it straight into the sprayer.  I have one of these large 1 gallon sprayers which is now primarily used to spray aspirin and folia feeds. When I got to the allotment I sprayed the onions again then did other plants around the allotment.  I am trying to keep the American mildew off my gooseberries and it seems to be working.  There was a little but not so much as I usually get at this time of the year.  I also sprayed the plum which was showing signs of suffering from an aphid attack.  I might just cut out the branches that are affected - they are only the very small ones. 

Originally aspirin was extracted from the bark of the willow tree.  It must have been doing something there so they investigated it and found that it was a messenger chemical for the plants immune system.  It seems to trigger off the defence mechanism that plants have against insects.
This is the first year that I have tried it.  I needed something that would combat onion eelworm on the allotment.  Eelworm has built up because I didn’t realise what it was and its affect on plants.  There are several different remedies that I am trying this year and assessing how well they work.
  I just bought some ordinary aspirin not really understanding that it is not very soluble in water.  I very rarely take any medicine and would rather eat herbs as a remedy.  I crush two of these tablets up and put them in hot water to try and dissolve them and then make it up to two gallons in a watering can.  After that I put the resulting solution into a sprayer.  I would say that there has been a noticeable change in the onions.  The first being that I can grow them without them keeling over and rotting off.   They are also much bigger than I can usually grow them.  These are early days but I am optimistic. Finally I planted out the sweet corn and the courgettes.  This is later than last year but I don’t think the plants suffered.   They were not root bound in the pots so they would have been alright for another couple of weeks. The soil felt really warm when I was doing this but this may just have been the contrast between the soil and that clold north easterly wind.   I decided to plant a row of nigellia alongside them as a complanion plant. I am not sure whether they are good companion plants or not but they will attract things like bees and hoverflies that will benefit plants on the allotment. 

The Limanthes douglassi or poached egg plant has germinated well so that will be a good companion plant for the lettuces, rocket, lambs lettuce and radish. There is plenty of tagetes in the onion bed.  Californian poppy is going to be put in with the leeks.  If you want more and better information about companion planting have a look at digmyplots website.  It is well worthwhile.  (see my blogroll list).    I do not find planting peas out from these modula trays very pleasant.  I usually just dig a small trench, throw the peas in and cover.  Takes about 1/2 an hour at the most.  Planting hundreds of pea seedlings is like watching paint dry.  It sucks up time.  Still I did it but I still have 2 1/2 trays to plant.  I will put these in as soon as it stops raining.  By this time the cold northeasterly wind blowing at quite a rate was getting to my bones so I decided to call it a day and went home with a few radish, lettuce, rocket, lambs lettuce and spinach leaves to make a fantastic salad. 

It is raining today so I will not be going down to the allotment today. The forecast is for this weather to continue tomorrow so I doubt if I will do anything tomorrow either.  I still need to plant out the red onions, tomatoes, tagetes, pumpkins, cucumbers and the aubergines.  I also need to weed the whole allotment, tie up the sweet peas and hoe up the potatoes a little more.  (The blackbirds keep scraping away the ridges looking for worms.)