One of the amazing things about having the allotment is seeing how much it changed and burst into life over the summer. Well if summer was a 100m sprint autumn is more like a gentle stroll through the park. The allotment is slowly putting on it’s winter coat in the form of lots of rotted manure on the beds, followed by the sowing of some green manure.
The idea with green manure is that you plant it whenever you have bare soil. It quickly grows and you either dig it in straight away to provide some extra humus to the soil or you can leave it to help smother weeds and prevent rain from leaching away the good stuff in your soil over winter. We are leaving ours in over winter, which has the added bonus of giving our plot some much needed colour over winter.
We didn’t really have much to do today. We harvested some beetroot for tea (three types!) and a few peppers, tomatoes and chillies, tied up the apple tree (thanks to Pilla’s old tights!), fed the greenhouse plants and that was about it. Home in time to watch the derby.
Another quietish day at the allotment. We didn’t plan to stay long because we didn’t think we had too much to do – there were a few tidying up jobs and a fair bit of harvesting, but nothing huge or time consuming. Whilst I was busy chopping down the spent cucumber plants in the greenhouse, Pilla was busy dealing with some overgrown chard and harvesting blueberries (sadly enough we counted how many blueberries we’ve had this year. From one plant we have had over 100, from one plant zero. Why?!)
We then set about clearing the cauliflowers. The cauliflowers were a disappointment this year, we didn’t manage to harvest a single one. They went from looking perfect, but small to bolted and flowery in a week. After taking down the netting (another thing we need to improve upon for next year) we composted the cauliflowers and put some manure on the half of the bed that we never planted anything in after our savoy cabbage seedlings failed. The manure is amazing – it’s been rotting for a good few months now and is absolutely full of worms. I don’t mean that there are a couple crawling around on the surface, I mean every trowel full has hundreds and hundreds of them. It’s quite impressive.
I then sowed some green manure on a couple of the beds we manured up last week. We then just had to harvest our goods. We are still getting loads off the plot – this week we took home blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, green & yellow courgettes, green and red peppers, chillies, aubergines, rhubarb and loads more tomatoes. Pilla put some to good use this afternoon by making tomato and chilli jam using our own tomatoes, chilli and garlic. Delicious!
Well, it only seems like a few weeks ago that we were busy potting on and planting out but now we are well into our autumn jobs. Today’s big task was to remove the sweet peas that have given our plot a good splash of colour for the last few months.
Whilst Pilla was getting busy with the secateurs (and running away from the spiders that seem to love hiding out in the sweet peas. In fairness to Pilla the spiders were huge, I mean they must have been at least the size of a small pea) I set about tidying up the greenhouse. We had let it all get a bit overgrown and there were plenty of old leaves hanging around in there. Annoyingly enough, there were also plenty of big fat caterpillars eating our tomatoes and aubergines.
We are still getting lots of things from our greenhouse, in fact I think we had our biggest harvest in there today. For all our cutting down things, we do still have the odd burst of colour, with the flowers at the front of the plot doing their best to last into the autumn.
The only other thing left to do was add in some more manure onto the recently emptied beds and that was it for today.
Plot 97! Well, partially at least. This weekend brought the annual summer show and with it the hotly contested produce competition. We saw the show last year and it gave us lots of inspiration about what we might be able to enter ourselves this year. But we did not expect to have much produce to choose from so it was a surprise to be able to enter 15 items into the competition. Neil had been constantly telling me in the last few weeks that it was the taking part that counted and that we probably wouldn’t win anything, but the competitive streak in me meant I was desperate to win something, anything!
We are pleased to announce our results as follows: first place for our garlic, second place for our beetroot and runner beans and third place for our shallots, dahlia and my Victoria sponge!
We were really pleased to be taking part let alone winning any prizes so it made our hard work over the past year worthwhile. Out of all the people who won prizes in the competition we came third. Both second and third place were held by members who are in their first year of having a plot so it just goes to show what can be achieved even in the early days with a bit of enthusiasm and a lot of luck! A special mention must go to Bob, as without him I’m sure we would be floundering around not knowing what to do and when, so he definitely deserves some of the credit for our prizes.
We still had some work to do at the plot this weekend, once the victorious glow had mellowed a bit! Having dug up our onions and garlic recently we have quite a bit of empty soil on show. We didn’t really have the opportunity of spending much time improving our soil before we planted things this season due to the lack of time and so we want to remedy that for next year. We added some manure and organic soil improver to the bed that is fully cleared and after digging it through we sowed some green manure seeds. These will add nutrients, prevent leaching and reduce weed growth over winter.
I planted out some of the lettuces that had been in the coldframe and harvested more of the tomatoes that were ripe. It is nice to be planting things out rather than pulling them up as at this time of year you can start to feel nostalgic for the greenery that was bulging out of every bed only a few weeks ago. But there are still enough things growing to last us into the autumn. We have a pumpkin that is getting more swollen by the day; our blackberry bush is sending out branches metres long and the squash are starting to develop.
We cannot help but get excited already about all the things that we will be growing next spring, such is the cycle of being a budding allotmenter. Fingers crossed for more prizes next year!
We had another busy weekend, mostly spent at birthday parties and watching the cricket, so we had to fit our allotmenting into our day off on Friday.
We harvested our onions, cut down the spent sugar snap peas and most of the broad beans, weeded and tidied up the front of the plot. Whilst Pilla was busy doing that, I gave our chilli plants some attention – a few had become a bit dry and wilted. We also harvested the potatoes we had left in the ground and prepared our second strawberry bin.
So, that’s it – we’ve had the plot a year. We’ve been looking back at the old pictures and it’s quite amazing that we’ve managed to fit in getting so much done – so many times we got something finished just as we needed it. I think both of us are looking forward to taking a bit more time next year and we have all of autumn and winter to plan it. This period last year was just a mass panic of ‘where are we getting our fence/wood/soil/greenhouse/shed/glass/pots/shelving from?!’ We are going to be making a list of jobs to do soon and this should definitely be more manageable than ‘create a brand new plot’.
My last job at the plot today was to take some pictures in the same places as we took last year – the video below is my go at stitching it all together. The pictures above were taken from a rather precarious standing-on-the-top-rung-of-the-fence position. It’s fair to say if Philippa had been there I wouldn’t have been allowed to clamber up there!
Our plot is now officially 1 year old! We promise to put some more pictures on soon (hopefully tomorrow), but for now I’ll give you a one-off video special…
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