The Turkish Bizarre...

I know I don't normally communicate with you midweek. But I'm all of a tingle. Why? I have just won second prize in an agricultural show. The mis-shapen vegetable contest! At last, I've found my true vocation...no, really, it wasn't me, it was my Turk's Turban Squash that got the honour. Rather pathetically, we came second to a potato, but you can't have everything. Actually, you can't have very much at all off my allotment this week. Just about all the seeds I planted two weeks ago (whose, appearance, I very much regret to say, I boasted about last week) have been killed off by flea beetles. Today, I was up there yet again, preparing yet another seed bed, this time hoping to grow some spring cabbages. This time I'm using free seeds from September's Grow It! magazine. And I tell you, I'd be only too happy to Grow It if something else didn't keep coming along to Eat It! Ohh, but I also have a hot tip. I needed something to protect my little Brussel Sprout plants from the cabbage white butterfly, and I found it! I unravelled an old Body Shop Bath Lily (a strange round thing made out of some kind of netting), cut the strip down the centre and voila, a perfect net! It's now held in place by a series of those little windmills that children play with at the beach and some pebbles. The whole thing looks quite high tech, like a miniature wind farm. Back in the garden things are beginning to take off too. The QVC begonias have started to flower and the pond is bursting with life. Wouldn't it be lovely now, to get some summer weather?

And the rest fell on good ground...

My word! Yesterday's post actually generated a query about what I'd been planting. Obviously, my previous conviction that there's nothing more to be done in an allotment as August approaches is a widely held assumption...this is precisely why Grow Your Own has a late summer seed promotion. Well, I've planted Swiss chard, radicchio, turnip, swede, Autumn carrot, Chinese leaves, and Japanese spinach. And they've all started to come up already! This is just as well, as the mizuna and rocket I'd grown on the back patch were overwhelmed by flea beetle. I just couldn't keep the ground damp enough. I know what I'm going to do, though. I'm going to plant a dastardly mix of Japanese salad leaves which absolutely nothing will touch with a barge pole (including, humans, incidently, if you're not careful to remove the more volcanic mustard varieties from the mix before they reach the table. H nearly had convulsions one supper time last year...). Then I'll just prize the mizuna leaves out. Ha! Anyway, back to the plot... We've also planted little cabbage, purple and white sprouting broccoli, and, wait for it, brussel sprouts! Why the exclamation? Because our Esteemed Leader banned us from planting these as he said they never grew well in our county. But Patrick said that's nonsense. So, we're going ahead, but we're pretending that the crop is Japanese Walking Stick Plants. What extraordinary subterfuge! And I've got a little line of kale too, which EL absolutely detests...We can expect fireworks, and well before November 5th, I fear. And I should mention too, that we are cropping regularly now. We've got an abundance of lollo roso (red lettuce, to you chum), tomatoes, and courgettes, not to mention the squashes just pouring out of the Victorian hotbed. And if all else fails, there's always more potatoes...It's a pity about all the hard work, though. I'm aching from top to toe today.