Grafting for supper

I guess I have to put my hand up and admit to being one of those sad buggers who likes looking through seed and plant catalogues and placing orders. I especially like looking at what's new and novel.

I mentioned a couple of days ago about the new flower sprout from T&M, which I'm definitely growing this year. There are other 'newbies' that I've ordered and am having a go with this year, but possibly the one that I'm looking foerward to the most is the new range of grafted vegetables from Suttons. I mentioned these when I went to their Press Day last year, but now I've actually got some coming to grow at home.

I've ordered the pepper 'Sweet Chelsea', aubergine 'Scorpio', chilli pepper 'Medina', melon 'Sweetheart' and the double grafted tomato for something really unusual. If you're interested and want to have a go, visit the Suttons website.

Getting blown away

Wow, it's windy. And if there's one thing I hate (since experiencing the Great Storm of 1987) it's wind. We've had a few fence panels become dislodged, but managed to rescue them before they completely blew away. Now I'm inside catching up with work - rather than being outside, which is what I'd prefer.
In the lead up to the week before the big gardening weekend - Easter - I've been recording more messages for Garden Radio. Looks like potting compost, young herbaceous plants and a vast array of fertilisers are the big things being promoted in garden centres - and it looks like there are a lot of great offers available.
The broad beans and lettuces in the growing frame are growing at great speed. They even needed a watering this week, as the conditions in there are so warm that the soil had dried out quite a lot. Then typically it started to rain soon afterwards. Never mind, the rain just can't penetrate deep enough, so they needed a good watering. Mind you, according to my Oregon Scientific weather station we had 32mm of rain last night. The pond certainly looks full!
The garlic plants in the lean-to frame, which were meant for the allotment are growing well and have put on a spurt of growth. Sadly, the allotment isn’t quite ready for them yet, so I had a change of heart and have planted out two rows in the raised beds. There’s still a tray of 12 left so these can go out onto the allotment at a later stage. They might need potting up first though as the cells are getting chocka with roots.
I made the first outdoor sowing yesterday of radish - four cultivars in fact as I'm taking part in the RHS radish trial. Can't wait to see how each one grows and, more importantly, eat them.
And I've also managed to sow some chilli and sweet peppers in the propagator.
I’ve just received some young tomato plants from Suttons. These are plants they want to trial. There’s ‘Elegance’ and ‘Hundreds and Thousand’ plus a grafted plant of ‘Elegance’. Suttons are selling grafted plants this year on a rootstock that will give them greater strength to fight off diseases including tomato blight. After last year’s fight with blight I’m looking forward to seeing how they perform – although I’m not looking forward to blight returning as bad as it was last year.