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Wednesday 29 June 2011

Hairy sweetcorn...

The weather for the allotment has been fantastic for the last few days, from blistering hot sun to lashings of rain and its amazing how quickly everything grows, sadly this includes weeds.  Does everyone else constantly weed their plot or is it just us?  I tend to spend most weekends weeding between tomatoes, potatoes, beans, garlic, beetroot, salad leaves and so on and as fast as I am removing it, it comes back.  So I just wondered.

One good thing about the weather is the change ive seen in the sweetcorn that we have growing.  Last year was a bit of a disaster as we left it too long and the kernals were all a bit manky.  This year we have tried again, propagated the seeds and then transfered them to the allotment and it goes a little like this:

A few weeks after being planted in the ground

The photograph I took tonight of the sweetcorn flourshing
The photo taken last weekend

 So as you can see from the photos they all seem to be doing really well.  I read somewhere that you know they are ready when the hair on the cobs turns brown and then if you can, peel back the silks on one of the cobs to see if you can see the sweetcorn and if you cant it isnt ready.  Has anyone got any other advice?

Oh and as for the shed..... it has gone from this

The shed not long after being built on a rainy friday afternoon
The finished shed, treated and painted.               


To the shed we have added a pathway, planted some bedding plants each side of the pathway and then purchased two grapevines and there they are growing against the shed.

4 comments:

  1. Dont worry, we weed loads too, think it's natures way of making sure you have to keep a watch on every inch of your plot... ;)

    As for the corn, we check for ripe'ness in a pretty much the same way. We also push a fingernail into a bit of the corn to check the juice is a milky colour as someone told us that was 'the way' when we started out. No idea if it's worth the effort though as we've never found it non-milky lol :)

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  2. your shed looks fab hun
    your sweetcorn is doing well. I am so excited about mine turning brown x

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  3. It is a good year for sweet corn I think. How are yours?

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  4. Today I decided to visit some allotment blogs in Uk. I was curious how you set up your food growing. I have to make a comment about weeding---I have been doing it for weeks! Do you do anything special to get your beets so large? We are trying to grow them in our space this year. I will stop by again--robbie:-)

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