Episode #31 - Triangulating tulips
12 - 25 April: New bed beginnings, more blossom, and the wrong tulips, Gromit.
The post was started back in April, when we were on the glide path into the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, traditionally a big, if not the biggest, gardening week in the UK. Everything on the plot was bursting with growth.
I’ve left the post as it was first drafted, despite it lounging in the drafts folder for a few weeks while life elsewhere got in the way. Present tense, even though the dates are in the past. I’ve more catching up to do, so expect Episodes 32-34 to follow on. I need to catch up.
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The week’s Plot Shot
The blossom on the stone fruit is all but over, and the pears and the apples are taking their turn. This is on one of our ‘Lord Lambourne’ apples. (I recently found out that said Lord Lambourne was President of the Royal Horticultural Society from 1919 to 1928, which is why the apple was named after him when it was introduced in 1907.)
(Technical note: there are usually a *lot* of photos, mainly mine, in this post, and it might not all fit on your email. Hitting the View Entire Message button at the end should sort this out, as will reading via the app or online versions of Substack.)
Plot work in progress
This spring has been warm and dry, and the greenhouse is filling up with seedlings. I have shown uncharacteristic restraint this year in the annual ordering of chilli plants. Most years we end up with far too many, and with the greenhouse bursting with unruly plants all summer as they jostle for light and space.
This year we have one success of a chilli overwintered for the first time, in fact the same plant now overwintered twice, so now in its third year, a ‘Bartlett’s Bonnet’ grown from seed. Barty spent the winter at home and is now back making new friends with the next generation.
The Big New Thing for 2025 is the new asparagus bed, for which the crowns have arrived and are waiting to go in. An asparagus bed has been a long time coming to Plot 101, something we’ve thought about for years but not had the right space for.
Now there’s a well-dug, manured 4’ x 12’ bed which has been covered over with weed fabric all winter and which is in sunlight for most of the day, now that the cherry plum tree has been cut back. More on this new bed to come - I’m excited!
Harvesting now
The plot is firmly in the ‘hungry gap’ now, a few ragged over-wintered brassicas, all about to go to seed, and nothing new ready to crop. The broad beans aren’t doing well at all, so the cupboard is definitely bare.
Last spring we lost a lot of our woody herbs - most of the thymes and sages gave up in the wet clay soil, possibly dissolved - but a golden thyme has kept chugging away under the red currant bushes. Just enough for some chopped fresh herbs on roast potatoes, but nothing to add to the (currently static) plot tally.1
Making and eating
In the slow lane are the broad beans. In other years I’ve had a decent crop from broad beans by now, but not in 2025. The red-flowered varieties (new to me this year) are beautiful, but no beans yet folks.
Anyone else running late with their broad beans, or is it just me?
E17 Local Heroes
Unlike the broad beans, the tulips are heroic this year. If tulips had an annual performance review, I’d be recommending them for a big fat bonus on the basis that they’ve more than met their objectives and exceeded expectations.
I’m gradually narrowing down the Great Tulip Mix-Up. I’ve trawled back through emails to find the original orders last autumn, matching up crumpled delivery notes and labels on brown paper bags. Triangulating from the available evidence, I’m reasonably sure I now know which tulips I planted where, and why I’ve been confused. Some varieties must have been swapped along the way (looking at you, “China Pink’ instead of ‘Passionale’), and quantities of others adjusted to make up numbers (*way* more ‘Ronaldo’ than I was expecting).
Community of Practice
The whole site is enjoying the fruit trees being in blossom. Everyone is delighted with just how much blossom there is everywhere, even on the oldest trees like our gnarled bird cherry, marking the corner of the plot.
The blossom on a (mainly) sunny Easter Bank Holiday weekend is getting everyone super excited for how well the trees will fruit this year. We’ve all got trees which have struggled in the poor wet springs of 2024 and 2023, so we are holding our breath.
What is clear is that all the winter pruning has paid off, if the quantity of blossom is anything to go by. It is hard to think about being up a rickety ladder, wielding secateurs in the January cold, when the trees are bouncing with blossom three months later, but the pruning practice pays off. I’m still cross with myself for not getting around to taking down the water shoots on the top of the ‘Lord Lambourne’ apples. I kept thinking that I’d get around to it, that there would be next, another, weekend, and then I was out of time.
Somehow there is a lot of time on allotments, and suddenly there isn’t.
Fox News
Scampi is making his Substack debut here, with a hard stare. One of the younger generation, not the elders, but finding his way and his place in the extended fox family. Photos of any of the foxes are hard to get at this time of year. All the action is in dens with the vixens’ new cubs, and they only come out if there’s food on offer. The boys get sent to grab dinner.
Until next time, when I’ll still be catching up with myself.
Ang
Plot tally as at 25 April: £13.35 for the year to date.
Broad beans also a disappointment - mostly because the blackbirds and pigeons like to help themselves
Our broad beans are late too but we do have perennial kale, chard and 9 star sprouting broccoli to keep us going. At the RHS garden in Essex last week their broad beans were ready!