The late, cold spring had me longing to put a polytunnel over my entire allotment. At the beginning of May, I had basil and tomatoes shivering in cold frames wrapped up in fleece as tightly as I was wrapping a scarf around my neck, but the season catches up eventually.
There’s still time to sow crops direct, if the first lot shivered into submission or were slugged by this year’s epic sleepless slug population. The winter was so mild that they continued to breed, meaning we’re going into this season with hugely elevated population numbers.
French, borlotto and shelling beans, beetroot, carrots, mini cauliflowers, broccoli raab, spigariello (a marvellous sprouting broccoli type, from Franchi Seeds), kales, salads and the outdoor sowings of marrows, pumpkins, courgettes and cucumbers can now be sown direct.
For french, borlotto and shelling beans I’d make a sowing now, one in three weeks and another at the beginning of July to cover for a final autumn bonus. I don’t sow a great deal each time; enough to be thinned out to five or six plants a row. I sow direct, two seeds per station. I love the dwarf bean variety ‘Faraday’, from Sea Spring seeds: it has delicious thin green beans that crop quickly. The cropping period in dwarf varieties is shorter than climbers, but by sowing in succession, there are always tender beans to pick.
If you make your first few sowings a dual variety, one that can be eaten young as french beans or allowed to mature for storage, you can save on space, too. The best variety for this is ‘Lazy Housewife’, originally from Andalusia, that makes flat green pods which are tender when young and fatten to creamy white beans by the end of the season. Brown Envelope Seeds and Real Seed Company both offer this variety as well as other good storage beans. ‘Lazy Housewife’ is a climber, but you can dwarf any bean by pinching out the growing tip continually, forcing it to bush out. You may need to offer a little support, though.
I start sowing carrots in earnest now, too. I have terrible carrot fly issues, because my allotment is surrounded by cow parsley. It’s maddening because I love wandering through this to get to my plot, but the carrot fly uses the cow parsley as a hotel in which to overwinter. The minute cow parsley fades, the fly hops on to carrots.
One trick is to give a beat before the last of the cow parsley and the first sowing of carrots, then cover them immediately after sowing. The carrot fly is wily when it comes to finding holes in fleecing or netting, so bury the edges. The female is a notoriously poor flyer: if you’re on a flat site, a barrier a couple of feet high may stop her, but if the cow parsley rises above your site she coasts in on a downward wind and will skim over your barrier. If she’s laid eggs, the foliage of the carrots will have a red tinge. ‘Resistafly’ and ‘Flyaway’ are the most carrot-fly-resistant varieties.
