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Friday, 11 March 2011

Vento Shallots Parsnips Celery

Due to the poor performance of the Vento I decided to buy some plants from Medwyn to top up on numbers, these arrived today and they are far better and further on than mine he must not put the snot ball round his seeds as he has managed to germinate his they were not cheap at nearly a tenner for ten but well worth it I think.They have now been potted up and are under the lights.The Vento I took the green casing off and sowed as an experiment have all germinated 100% as have Smithys.

I have spoken to Smithyveg regarding my Shallots of which some are getting quite large he has advised me not to plant them out just yet so I potted the largest ones on today in to 11 cm pots to keep them going a bit longer as you can see from the photo they have a cracking root system
Finally got some Celery to germinate I am about a month behind last year but as last years were ready for my earliest show in August I am not to worried as my main focus is for the collection of 6 at Harrogate one of us needs to prove Dave Thornton wrong.

I have also planted a couple of drums with chitted parsnip seeds the variety is Pinnacle these are also for the August show in Huddersfield I will be sowing some more in a couple of weeks time for the later shows 
after much deliberation the mix i used is as follows 
75 litres of compost 
50 litres of topsoil
25 litres of silver sand 
25 litres of fine vermiculite
to this I added 
2 oz seaweed meal
2 oz calcified seaweed
4 oz vitax Q4 
2 oz garden lime 
everything was passed through a 1/8" sieve the calcified seaweed and vitax were put through the blender first to powder them.The whole lot was then put in the mixer for half an hour, this is something I learned on Tuesday from Ian Stocks, he reckons there is no point in only mixing for a few minutes as the mix may not be evenly distributed.  


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