by Neil Wilkinson | May 25, 2009 | Allotment
I’m not sure where we would be on the allotment without the bank holidays – we spent two days doing allotment jobs and half a day shopping for allotment goodies this weekend. In fact, we got so much done this weekend that I think I will temporarily leave the descriptive posts we’ve been doing behind and try listing everything we got done instead.
Saturday
- Fed chickens and opened up the coop
- Bought bedding plants, flowers and organic slug pellets from garden centre
- Bought replacement trowel (my digging is so fierce I broke the first one on the very first use. Plastic and metal is no match for me) and water butt irrigation system from B&Q
Sunday
- Planted out the cauliflowers
- Planted out the lemon thyme, french thyme and oregano
- Moved the greenhouse shelves into the shed and had a general tidy up both shed and greenhouse
- With Tom, built netting around cauliflowers to protect from woodpigeons
- Set up drip irrigation system to the water butt. This should make watering our greenhouse plants a bit easier. (More information on this another week I think)
- Pilla and Nic weeded the plot
- Pilla and Nic planted out some of the bedding plants
- Neil planted out the new flowering blue scabious (sounds horrible, is very pretty)
- Pilla added some of the slug pellets
- Put chickens to bed
Monday
- Planted out all of the remaining bedding plants together with the marigolds from Sharon across the front of the plot, into two old hanging boxes we had and across the rear of the plot
- Created hanging boxes for flowers & possibly tomatoes
- Planted out three lavender plants
- Planted out runner beans onto the new munty frame
- Potted on two cucumbers to their final pots
- Potted on kale, basil, two sets of courgettes and more tomatoes
- Put dahlia, french beans and some basil into the cold frame
- Thinned out all the carrot containers
- Thinned out lettuces
- Added more manure to the poo pile
And finally done. Phew! We also have another job to do after this weekend – build somewhere shady and cool. So much of our time has been spent being cold over winter I think we completely forgot how hot allotmenting can get. We have nowhere shady to hide and I think we should try and resolve this, particularly after a little bit of sunburn for both of us yesterday in spite of our suncream!
Special thanks to Tom and Nic for their help on Sunday and for the refreshments they brought, particularly the banana muffins! Allotmenting is much more fun with friends.
by Neil Wilkinson | May 4, 2009 | Allotment
We took advantage of the long weekend to get absolutely loads done off our ever changing to-do list. We managed to get to the allotment on each of the last three days (although once was just to feed the chickens and let them out).
One thing we seem to have no trouble growing are these mushrooms. They take advantage of the wet and warm weather we’ve been having and sneak up around your plot when you are not looking. They take about 4 seconds to grow. Ok, maybe not quite that quick but you get the idea. We had about 8 of the blighters to add to the compost heap. We’d planted some broad beans and sweet peas out last week, which were our first transplanted seeds, so the first job was to check they are ok and they seem to be thriving. We’ve been having nightmares all week about hoards of roaming slugs coming to devour them!
Next up I set about planting more sweet peas across the front of the plot and up the fence and Pilla planted a few of the seeds we were a bit late starting off in the greenhouse, sweetcorn and courgettes. Pilla then started the epic task of transplanting seeds in the greenhouse. Pretty much everything we have planted is doing well so we had a lot of things to move into bigger pots, which included: lots of different tomato varieties, peppers, cauliflowers, sunflowers, cucumbers, basil, parsley and sweet majoram. It’s a fairly time consuming process and you have to make some life and death decisions over which seedlings to keep and which go to the great compost heap in the sky. It was carnage.
After adding a third water butt next to the greenhouse with some bricks from Sharon’s plot we called it a day (hi Sharon!). Today we caught up with planting the things we should have put out in late April. The big thing to get planted were the carrots. We’ve sort of run out of bed space for them so we have planted them in a selection of sqaure Pearson bins – which all had to be cleaned out, drilled, lined with membrane, and then layered up with gravel, soil and stone free soil. We now have three varieties sown – regular, round and purple. Whilst I was doing this Pilla was on a mad planting spree – filling up beds with a couple of types of beetroot and spring onions.
We have lots of things growing outside now – our parsnips have germinated and are doing so well we had to thin them down. We have had to do the same with the radishes and leaf beet. Our red and white onions have started sprouting and some potatoes are starting to appear above the soil. Other less desirable things are growing too – the plot has sprouted quite a lot of weeds. The raised beds help quite a lot with weeding because you can sit on the edge of one and reach across quite easily.
We have about a million spiders in our greenhouse and they were temporarily joined today by a butterfly, who was reading the seed packet and complaining about vague spacing instructions I think!
by Neil Wilkinson | Apr 12, 2009 | Allotment
We didn’t really have any major jobs to do this weekend (and last Monday too) but it started to dawn on us during the week that we had set a lot of our seeds aside to be planted in April and now we are almost halfway through the month. This prompted a burst of planting activity today. On Friday we delicately transported the batch of seeds we’d started in the flat over the last few weeks and already today they seemed to be much happier in the greenhouse, they definitely get more light there than on our windowsill.
We are still really just guessing when to plant things and we like to get caught up in the slight panic that seems to sweep over the plots at this time of year (“oh, they have potatoes in, should we put ours in?”). So today we have sown, in no particular order:
- Parsnips
- Leaf beet
- Sugarsnap peas
- French dwarf beans
- Runner beans
- Dill
- Sage
- Basil
- Thyme
- Sunflowers
- Fuschia
- Tomatoes
We’ve had limited success starting off peppers & chillies indoors at home so we are trying some more in the greenhouse. Over the last week we have also put our potatoes in. We are experimenting with them, we have some in the beds and some in tubs.
We probably would have got more done but we had to buy some supplies from Bob at the store which entailed a walk across the site. This is not a fast process at the best of times as you tend to have a bit of a chat (and I’ll be honest here, a bit of a nosey at what everyone else is doing with their plots) but when Philippa is with you AND she is giving out shortbread then the 5 minute walk turns into an hour long meander. This is not an exaggeration.
We took the opportunity to plant some bee attracting plants that Mum gave me (thanks Mum) although one of them is looking a little bit lonely at the moment:
The rest of the plot is getting slightly more colourful everytime we go, although I have cheated slightly by taking super close up’s of these:
Garlic and shallots:
Recent Comments