Veg4Show

To my delight opon checking the watering as I do, I can see the first signs of my parsnips germinating. I have never had a problem germinating my parsnips but it's always a worrying time from the stories you hear of poor germination rates. I suppose being inside makes a difference, but I feel keeping them moist all the time while germinating is important. I probably watered these once every 2 days for the period of two weeks when we saw the sun shine, and once every 3 days when it buggered off. I don't ever cover with glass or polythene as they are inside I just put fleece over them which helps to avoid them drying out in the sun.

My long carrots will be going in as soon as I have the time, no stress this year..they go in whenever I have time and feel like it, I'm bored of sticking to dates. Unlike my parsnips they will be covered with polythene as they prefer a higher germination temperature.

Well I did manage to get those parsnips in eventually and I predict they should be up in 3 days. Normally it takes 17-20 days inside so I'm expecting them to be up any day now.

I have gone totally mad, never happy and always wanting to try new things and gone with this method.

I still believe growing in 6inch pipes can produce top notch parsnips from what I have tested. They will travel down forever in a pipe and always stay dead straight, but thats the problem..controlling the length. I can't stop them and the tails suffer because of this reaching the bottom of a 7ft pipe. I tried increasing the length of the pipes but found the compression was to high for anything over 4.5ft in length and also the bore hole restricted due to the extra length. Thats all for another day to explain tho when I get around it.

This method is half and half. I still have quite a bit of pipe going into the barrel to keep that compression on the top. I'm hoping what with with planting them later and using this method I can grow similar parsnips that I do in pipes but less length. I'm sure people will think I'm crazy wanting less length but trust me, no one want's to pull perfect parsnips to find they are 2cms across at the tail, it just doesn't work, I need 100% to be smooth whisper thin tails.

(ignore barrels on the far right, that is where my tomatoes will grown and these barrels will go the other side of the parsnips for my carrots)

Despite this little lot in my greenhouse I have millions of aphids everywhere..So how many of these would I need to control these pest's in a 16x8 greenhouse?

I have around 100 onions at the moment and will be rounding this down to my best 60 this week when I pot them up into 3 Litre pots. Again the same with my leeks they are now on natural light and since taking the picture have also been moved to the cooler part of the greenhouse.

I think these onions are on par and is the size I'd expect for this time of year. I have had the odd; what I think is fusarium basal rot (as I did last year) which is always concerning, but what can I do? happens to my leeks and onions every year, you just have to cope as best you can.

Time has been tight and with the extra work of putting up another greenhouse (this time in my own garden) I really haven't had any time to update my blog.

So a quick update.

My Welsh seedling leeks are coming on really well, I have now taken them out from under the lights and as you can see I have no need to pull them yet and as you can see from the picture are nearing the size of my finger. They have been shifted into the cooler part of the greenhouse and next weekend will be in 4 litre pots where they will now start to grow extremely fast.

I haven't had as much time as I'd like ..infact non..to look after them, but considering they are doing fine, not perfect but who cares.

I will get a post up later on my onions.