Enough of the whingeing about the perma-shade that seems to encloak my beautiful plot!Goodbye to the speculation about how low in the sky the sun is at this time of year! No more guessing about whether anything will grow!
I have decided to see how fertile my allotment is by using….science! I shall conduct a carefully structured experiment to see just how likely it is that my allotment will produce vast quantities of lovely veg this year.
And the tool I shall use? The botanical key with which to unlock the secrets of my plot? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…..the humble radish. Ta dah!
So here’s the plan: radishes grow super-fast, from seed to crunchy mouthful in around a month. Ideal for my purposes. I will therefore plant radishes simultaneously in carefully selected spots across my gardening empire, sit back and observe the results. In around a month I will have a definitive answer as to how fast things grow in different parts of the allotment. Brilliant, n’est-ce-pas?
Now I know that the two raised beds at the bottom of the garden are a sun-kissed paradise, so the radishes I plant there will turn into plump little salad accessories in no time. This, I believe, is known to science boffins as “the control”.
But the killer question is how fast the other seeds will grow. I will cast a few in each of the beds in the allotment and watch what happens.
My gut feel is that the raspberry and blackberry beds will be good for nothing – if I’m lucky my children might get to eat those radishes before they retire – but I’m vaguely hopeful that most of the other beds will come up with the good, albeit I suspect they might be a few weeks behind the suntrap in the garden.
We shall see.
The drooling vegetable 