by Philippa | Jun 4, 2013 | Allotment
After a scorching weekend a visit was definitely in order, to water at the very least. But I managed to get quite a lot done and we are pretty on top of things, which is impressive given the time that Neil’s training has been taking up.
Everything got a thorough water, the greenhouse thermometer read 44c when I checked. The sunflowers that had been in our makeshift coldframe were planted out in two long rows. We still have some spares so we’ll have to find some spare spots for them. I also weeded the whole of plot 118, I only wish some of our crops would grow as fast as the weeds!
While in the greenhouse I did some more sowing. Some green courgettes (dundoo organic hybrid) which despite the packet saying it contained an average of 5 seeds, had 18 in it (yes I counted, but what a bonus given they were pretty expensive!). Also a selection of cabbage varieties (tundra, candissa, kalibos pointed red and minicole) and a random variety of sweetpeas as the germination rate of our first sowings have been pretty poor. I sowed some pak choi (joi choi) inside too, I usually just sow straight outside but have found the slugs seem to like them when they are very young and tender so thought I’d try transplanting them out once they have had a head start inside.
I did some outdoor sowings too. Some swede (best of all), turnip (Milan purple top), spinach (perpetual and medania) and some rhubarb chard (red). The beetroots and carrots have germinated so will need thinning in a week or two. The parsnips have also come on great guns but bizarrely one variety is doing much better than the other. If they don’t even out, I might use the end of the bed that haven’t germinated properly for something else instead!
The asparagus has grown so much since I was last down on Friday, I’m sure if you stood and watched you would see it grow. Some is about a foot tall. There don’t seem to be many spears coming up but the ones that have popped up look good. I suppose there is still time but not sure it will ever thicken out at this rate!
by Philippa | Apr 20, 2013 | Allotment
The sun has arrived! This has been the first week or so where the weather has stayed consistently warm and we like it! But it has made us feel in a bit of a rush to get things planted out. With a cheeky mid week morning off work I popped along and sat in the sunshine sorting our seeds out so we know what needs planting and when. And it hit me quite how much needs to be planted now (or in reality should have been planted weeks ago when it was too cold). But at least the packets are now all neatly bundled up in piles!
The propagator seedlings were growing so quickly this week you could almost stand and watch it happen. One morning there would be a handful which had germinated, two hours later they had doubled in number! Once they were germinating it didn’t take long before they were at risk of getting too leggy. I took the tallest to the plot mid week and the last of them today. We potted them on in the greenhouse into seed trays. It’s always a panic when they flop over dramatically after they’ve been moved and you think you’ve killed them all but they had perked up by the time we left.
Neil took on a unexpected task today. He suddenly decided that as the sun was out it would be a good time to paint the front fence on 118. We didn’t even know if we had enough wood stain but after a mooch in the shed we found an almost full pot of it. It looked lots better after he was done. Although I think he got just as much stain on his face and arms! He also weeded the front as he went along, so two birds and all that.
While Neil was painting I planted some seeds-lots and lots of broad beans (masterpiece green longpod), purple podded peas, sugarsnap, early onward peas, gherkins, cauliflower (snowball and purple queen), sprouts (hastings), cucumber (burpless and cucino). There were also some seeds that needed to go straight outside so we have some neat rows of parsnips (countess and imperial crown) and rainbow chard. I loved the chard last year when we first tried growing it but we didn’t plant anywhere near enough so I made up for it this year!
There had been a big manure delivery so I filled up the depleted manure bay on 97 with plenty of trugs of it. Felt like we ticked off a lot of good jobs in the few hours we spent in the sunshine.
by Neil Wilkinson | Nov 21, 2010 | Allotment
It’s Pilla’s 29th birthday today and we celebrated it in style. Allotment style of course. We’ve had another big break in blogs, for which we are very sorry but it’s been a combination of a) not getting down to the plot that much recently and b) not much going on at the plots. Well, I say not much going on, this is actually my favourite time of year. The weeds are not growing, the place is quiet and you actually feel like you are making progress with the plots, it’s just that there is not that much interesting stuff to report. The day was slightly interrupted today with the annual allotment task of signing up the other plot holders and payment of rents but we managed to get lots done over the weekend none the less.
On Saturday Philippa spent her last few hours as a 28 year old by removing all the old plants from the greenhouse which is now almost completely empty and giving it a good clean out. It only seems like a few weeks ago we could hardly get in there and now there is not a single plant growing! I tidied up the raspberry canes on plot 97 by removing the canes that had fruited this year and tying up the new growth. There are probably about three times as many canes as last year and we were overrun with raspberries so it’s a little bit frightening how many we might get next year.
We’ve been talking for a while about getting a little tea shed on 118, before we could do this we needed a shed base, which I made on Saturday with a layer of sand and 8 of the 2″ by 3″ flags. It started level enough but by the time you have laid a few of those flags you get pretty tired and in the end it’s probably best described as ‘level enough’. It now sits proudly next to the greenhouse base. We did have a plan to put the greenhouse up today but we probably couldn’t have done it in the time we had available, so instead I decided to make a brick path to both the shed and the greenhouse. I think they are best described as rustic! No-one could describe them as level and if you hit the right bricks there are definitely a few wobbles, but it is a good way of using up lots of the bricks we have dug up over the plot. Pilla sorted through the many pots we had of spent compost and grow bags from the greenhouse and spread it all over the asparagus bed.
We’ve harvested our first sprouts since the last blog (of which Pilla ate three, a record!) and today took our first parsnips. What with the beetroot, cabbage and kale we are well into our winter crops already.
by Neil Wilkinson | Jun 1, 2010 | Allotment
Due to the Manchester 10km and Edinburgh marathon over the last two weekends we haven’t been spending a lot of time on the plots and have had even less time to update the blog. We’ve made up for the former by having a four day weekend of allotmenting and I’ve taken a lot of pictures to get a good update done.
Two weeks ago we moved the munty frame from 97 to 118 – there is a lot more room there and it held up very well in the move. We’ve planted out about twice as many runner beans as we did last year, with a new variety that’s a cross between a runner and a french bean and as such is less stringy. We got these out just after the last frost which caught a few people out (including killing the top leaves of our potatoes), and the beans seem to be doing pretty well, hopefully there won’t be another frost. This weekend we quickly hardened off the sweetcorn for a few nights and planted them out in front of the runner beans.
After the AGM on Sunday we bought four Brussel sprout seedlings as out of a whole tray of our own seeds only three germinates and we have only two viable plants. Considering just one of us eats sprouts I think two plants would be more than enough but it just didn’t feel like enough. Still, at 30p a seedling we hardly broke the bank! Next up was planting out some sugar snap peas, dwarf french beans, climbing french beans and peas. To do this we had to create something for them all to climb up – the dwarf french beans and peas need support up to about waist high, the climbing beans and sugar snaps need something considerably higher. I designed a totally unique structure (absolutley nothing like the bean structure on Bob’s plot, it’s not even close*) and put it right next to the nets I made for the sprouts (the netting is also nothing like the net structure just next to it on Bob’s plot. Totally different*) and Pilla planted out the seedlings and sowed a few extra peas in the holes for good measure. We then did a fair bit of weeding over the plot as the warm and wet weather over the last week seemed to have really brought out the weeds, they are growing quicker than everything else! We also planted a line of sunflowers in front of the beans and gave the onions and broad beans a liquid feed – we have some concerns about how fertile the soil is on this bit of the plot and neither the onions or broad beans look particularly healthy.
We spent a lot of time potting on plants in the greenhouse throughout the weekend as we had lots of plants busting to move into bigger pots. We potted on all of our tomatoes into their final pots, along with the padron and black pearl chilli’s, marconi and new ace peppers and the aubergines (moneymaker). I took down some of the staging to make room for the plants in their bigger pots – I took the staging down but left the ‘deck’ and legs in two large pieces which I then attached the side of the greenhouse. This keeps them out of the way and should mean it’s really quick to put up the staging again in the spring.
We did a general weed on plot 97, although there really wasn’t that many to take out. Pilla did some successional sowing of lettuces in a free bed, something that we weren’t very good at last year and vowed to improve upon this time around. On Sunday we thinned enough of the many lettuces we have to make a tasty salad for tea. Pilla also sowed another batch of parsnips and a few beetroot as the germination rate on the new plot has been really disappointing which we think might be a sign that the soil fertility is in need of some help . We had tons of beetroot last year (some of which won a prize at the summer show) so only having a few will be a real shame.
Elsewhere on plot 97 things are looking pretty good – we have lots of blackberry flowers across the whole length of the bush, it’s quite amazing that this was a tiny little plant this time last year. We have loads of little strawberries growing and in the same bed the raspberry canes are covered in fruits that are not quite ripe, flowers which results in frequent visits from many bees. The scabiosa plant has survived the winter and now has it’s first very pretty flower. Happily we only have a few days of work this week before we can get back to the plot!
* Ok, I ‘borrowed’ the design from Bob!
by Philippa | May 3, 2010 | Allotment
Final day of the long weekend and we still had plenty of jobs we wanted to accomplish. Having spent most of the last two days on plot 118 we needed to spend some time in the greenhouse on plot 97. There were a few things that needed potting on, having outgrown their seed trays. Neil constructed the rest of the staging to give us some extra space to spread out. We then potted on some marigolds, tomatoes, sunflowers and cucumbers. The latter are not strictly supposed to be transplanted once they have been sown but when you don’t know how many will germinate it would use far too much space to put four or more in large pots. We just made sure we were really careful not to damage their roots!
We then did some more sowing, almost nearing the end of our pile of seeds for this year. I planted three varieties of carrot (Flakkee, Flyaway and Ingot) into one of our clear beds. Carrots were a sore spot for us last year as they were pretty much the only thing we planted that didn’t work out. We used a series of pots but they went from looking quite healthy and bushy to having roots that were a mushy mess. We never established the reason for this, whether it was too much/too little water or some form of blight or insect. Rather than repeat our mistakes we decided to try a different tactic and put them straight into a bed. Considering our parsnips were successful and pretty straight we used the next bed along and sowed neat rows, fingers crossed for some seedlings.
We then returned to plot 118 and made some huge progress. Neil did some neat painting of the fence and got halfway along before rain stopped play (I’m sure the lifting of the paint lid is the allotment equivalent of a rain dance!). He then used some membrane we got from Bob (thanks Bob!) to cover the last big patch of grass and weeds between our large mound of soil and Debbie’s fence. Even if it doesn’t diminish the weeds it makes it look a lot neater for the time being.
We then tackled a job that wasn’t even on our list! Bob has kindly offered us the use of his rotavator next week to loosen the large area just behind the fence. It was pretty full of weeds and because it had been so long since it was turned over it was really hard and dry on the surface. The rotavator will do most of the work but we needed to get it started and also remove some of the deeper rooted weeds so we don’t chop them up and spread them further. It was a really good job to do as it made us feel like we have achieved a lot and certainly makes much more of the plot look like it is being worked effectively. I christened Neil the manic depressive gardener as after a brief visit on Friday he was feeling quite down and anxious about all that we had to get done yet by this afternoon he was grinning from ear to ear at how far we had progressed! Let’s hope the highs continue!
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