The plot's all dug over now so I added a little lime as always just to "sweeten" the soil a little and I'll also add a little sharp sand just to improve the clay structure a bit.
As I'm growing a few more exhibition carrots I'm in the process of filling these with sharp sand to grow them in,all of which needs barrowing across the field.
I decided to start a few shallots off in pots a bit earlier than normal as I've not had any good results over the last couple of seasons,and this is how I grew the exhibition ones last year with really good results ,so I thought I'd do the same with the normal eating ones.
Other than that some of the seeds have been arriving and the onion sets which just need to be kept cool and bright until planting.
The potatoes require "Chitting" which is simply placing them eyes upwards in a tray in a cool bright frost free place,and waiting for the resulting dark green shoots to appear.
Feb 5th.
Today was the day to do the tedious job of mixing my exhibition carrot compost.
I've made a purpose built riddle out of a supermarket delivery tray with the bottom cut out replaced with some 6mm mesh.
Then I suspended it over some timber like a swing.
This seemed to make it pretty easy to riddle out all the twigs and lumps and what's left is fine compost.
After about an hour and a half I managed to get just over 100 litres of fine stuff and about 20 litres of lumps and twigs out.
Then it's a matter of mixing a few other ingredients with the compost thoroughly.
4 parts sieved compost. 1 part sieved top soil 1 part fine vermiculite 1 part sand.
And also adding the following fertilizers and other bits.
To every 30 litres of this mix I add.
4 oz ground up Vitax Q4 2 oz ground limestone 2 oz calcified seaweed ground up 2 oz seaweed meal 1 oz nutrimate powder.
To mix it all together I do it in 30 litre batches in a huge lidded box which I can shake about and really get it all mixed together well.
I mixed around 200 litres in total which should be more than enough for my intended 25 long carrots,40 stump carrots and a hand full of parsnips.
So that's one more tedious job out of the way,below is a quick slideshow of last years efforts.
Feb 9th.
I went to my 1st NVS talk ever last night given by Ian Simpson who has been the National Carrot Champion and he gave everyone a clear,concise and interesting description of how he goes about his growing.
I would urge anyone to visit these events as you'll get so much info that you'd never get anywhere else.
It was very interesting in as much as there didn't seem to be any secrets other than growing under cover and using a really fine growing medium.
More by accident than design I found that he uses the exact same mixture as I do but the main difference is that he sieves his down to 1/8th of an inch which results in a really fine mixture and an exceptional skin quality on the carrots.
Also he adds as fertilizer Superphosphates plus sulphate of potash instead of Vitax.
So as a consequence I decided to have a go at his exact method and this evening have sieved some peat through a 3.35mm sieve.
As you can see the mesh is tiny and once I sieved it there was a good 40% that didn't pass through.
It also took an age to do.
The resulting peat was really fine though.
Anyway using my legendary carpentry skills I've knocked up a 2x2x2ft box which will accommadate 16 carrots.I'm going to put this in the polytunnel and see If these are any better than the outside ones.
