Another long day at the allotment. We got there bright and early to find two gifts – a bottle of homemade banana and apricot wine from Chris (thanks Chris!) and Bob had rotavated all of the ground that we had turned over last week (thanks Bob!). This was a huge job giving us lots more usable space and must have taken ages because the soil was rock solid. – the soil looks perfect for planting in now. I tried on a section I had turned over on Saturday and whilst Iwas struggling with the rotavator Pilla was busy feeding and watering the garlic and shallots on plot 97.
We made a quick call in to the stores to buy netting and canes (you can never have enough canes it seems) and also returned with a massive amount of wire fencing, which should easily be enough to cover the full side and the back of our plot. After lunch I used hoops to make the tunnel covering the cauliflowers and red cabbage, while Pilla sowed a couple of rows of swedes. Hopefully this should protect them from attack better than last year as the mesh on this netting is much finer.
Back on plot 97 we planted out our sweetpeas across the front and up the bamboo arch and filled up their place in the cold frame with the runner beans and purple sprouting broccoli. I did some more weeding on plot 118 and Pilla planted out kale (dwarf green curled), savoy cabbages (tarvoy) and sweetcorn (sweet nugget and mini-pop, a mini variety from Bob) in the greenhouse and a few more lettuce varieties out in the plots. We also potted on some of remaining chilli plants.
Our first fruit shouldn’t be too long away now, the strawberry flowers will soon turn to fruit and the red current bushes already have little green berries on-exciting!
More general tidying up to do today as there are more plants coming to the end of their life. Neil cleared the last of our tomato plants from the greenhouse, which suddenly looks very spacious! One of the pepper plants was now bare and a couple of the chilli plants were limp and so they went on the compost heap too. However, this was only after another bumper harvest – 15 habaneros and 47 chillies to join the bulging bag in the freezer and the ever lengthening string of dried chillies!
A bit of digging for some accompaniments for the Sunday roast followed. The leaves on our parsnips had grown considerably over the last couple of weeks and so we expected that the roots would have done their fair share of growing too and indeed they had. They were very tasty and sweet and were joined by a mixture of beetroot alongside our chicken. We also picked some kale for a chorizo and bean stew later in the week.
Our biggest job this week will come over the next few days when we have to address our minds to our seed order. We learnt from last year that it is easy to get carried away with your order as the names of fancy fruits and vegetables catch your eye! Also, some seed packets come with 12 seeds in them and others have 1200! As a result, we have some things that we will definitely have to order for next year and others that will last us for another two or three years. We have already decided a few new things that we want to try out, including swedes and broccoli and I am sure we will find other things to tempt us, so stay tuned.
Our visit to the allotment this morning coincided with some typical Manchester weather – a good bit of drizzle. Thankfully we had a whole lot of tidying up to do inside the greenhouse – it’s been two weeks since we spent some serious time there and lots more of our plants have now given up for the year, so we could hide from the worst of the rain and hack down half of the tomato plants.
The greenhouse now looks incredibly tidy and spacious! Whilst we were in there we had a visitor we hadn’t seen for a while, Tammy has been camping out with another plot holder for a while but must have fancied a break from the rain. She managed to find her way into quite a few pictures 🙂
We did some more serious harvesting today – we took home our pumpkin, two squashes and a whole trug of assorted chillies, habeneros, sweet peppers, courgettes, aubergines, onions and herbs. The chilli plants have really been the stars of autumn, they are absolutely covered in fruit and we harvest loads more each time we go. We counted 48 chillies today and this was after taking lots last week. Thankfully they freeze and dry very well so we should be eating our own chillies well into next year.
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!
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!
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