AAAhhhh. F*******g AAAhhh

Having spent the Saturday morning working at the Royal Highland show

I had the pleasure of visiting a fellow grower and member of the NVS (Mr Muirhead's) garden on the way back home. Neil & I have become acquainted and friends via the NVS forum and the Scottish branch seminar(all be it we are more than 3 hrs apart). Having thoroughly enjoyed my chat with Neil I headed back up the A9 thinking my onions were as good as his and I might have a couple of carrots  and peas that were growing ok. AAAhhh. Between leaving home on Friday morning and returning on Saturday evening 2 of my large onion plants had decided to throw up flower spikes. This happened to be two plants that were just over 10 inches and very well shaped.  This means I have only 10 plants to pick from.On the plus side my tatties appear to be growing on strongly and I will be applying a foliage feed of calcium Nitrate next week.  I have also had a Blight warning from the potatoes board. As I am growing between two large seed growers I need to be very careful regards blight and intent spraying both my tatties and my tomatoes at the first chance I get.       

  

 Thought I'd put a picture of my coloured tatties up to show the contrast in height of halum and colour of foliage. As you can see there are four different varieties in the picture. from left to right Blue Belle, Amour, Purple eyed seedling & Kestral. I'm happy with how they are growing just now.  I water once a week regardless of the rain fall. 

 The above shows my pea set up with peas from two different sowings. They are spaced 9 inch apart and the rows are 2 foot apart. One plant per cane, the canes are 8ft tall and I attach the plant to the canes using pea rings (sweet peas or velcro ties. As you can see my earliest plants are about 2 ft high now and will be flowering any time, (I hope)    

This is one of the onion plants that decided to throw up a flower spike.  They were both nice shaped plants and weighed just over 250 gms   Not sure what I have done wrong here but obviously the plants have become stressed at some time and  decided to go to seed.  I thought about trying to dry the bulbs off for the 250 gms section but was not sure if this was feasible.  Before I could get advice from more experienced growers, my wife had them in a stew for later this week.  Waste not want not.  Its disappointing when things go wrong but the most enjoyable part of this weekend was the couple of hrs bleathering to Neil and comparing different methods of growing the same veg.