… it must mean another three days at the allotment and we got tons done again. We had another big job list and managed to get quite a few of them done. Creating a list of jobs to do on the plot is easy, actually getting time to do them when your fitting in weeding, watering and harvesting is another matter.
First up was some time dedicated to planting up our crops for a late autumn harvest and clearing some of the massive soil pile. Whilst Pilla was preparing the beds on 97 for the sweet williams and wallflowers I got to work clearing the massive pile of mud we had been left on 118. The previous occupants had dug up the path one day (it was quite a comical raised grass path that was about 6″ higher than the soil either side) and piled it on one side of the plot. This had then got absolutely covered in horrible weeds and is full of glass and rubble. Which means that not only do we have to dig through it, we have to clear the weeds, glass and assorted hand tools contained within it. I think I’ve got past the half way point and must have cleared around 20 wheelbarrows of mud, putting in around the plot werever the soil looked a bit low (or was of rubbish quality). We thought about using the extra space cleared to plant things but as we had just had some fresh manure delivered from the stables next door we opted to start a manure pile instead. This will eventually rot down a bit and we’ll cover the plot in the winter with it. I can’t see it adding that many nutrients but it should make the soil a better condition and it’s probably been years since anyone put any down on this plot.
Pilla planted some late sowing turnips and some late peas on the new plot. The peas are going at the front where the new potatoes have just come up from. Having not had a crop in for years this side of the plot is on it’s second already this year! We did tons more harvesting too, comedy sized courgettes and cucumbers included. We picked some more new potatoes (probably just plain ‘potatoes’ now) and lots of beans. Having hardly had any beans last year they are one of our big successes this year. The climbing beans in particular have done really well and we are considering scrapping the dwarf variety next year. We haven’t even started on the runner beans of which there are approximately one million. I had a quick weed and managed to put down the last two flags I have on the path, which i’m very proud of as iIt has made a huge difference to how neat the plot looks.
Another exciting job was to plait the garlic we harvested last week. I found this ace link on how to properly tie it together, for begginners like us it was definitely a two person job, but the result is pretty impressive. Our garlic is huge this year, i think every head is as big as the biggest one from last year. We’ve got 27 in total form this solent wight variety, including 6 we have singled out for the show. We’ve also got a batch of smaller garlic, which we harvested this weekend, and it is currently drying in the greenhouse. We used a lot of our own grown things in the Tatton park picnic on Friday night, including lots of fruit in this raspberry jelly. MMMMmm!
Had a lovely allotment lunch today, a salad only containing things we grew on the plot. I went last night and got salad leaves, beetroot and broad beans and added some new potatoes, an egg and our cucumber. With a homemade honey and mustard dressing it was flipping lovely!
…As our regular reader(s?) will know it’s been a while since the last update on here, very nearly a month in fact. We’ve not been managing to get down to the plot as much as we would like this summer for a variety of reasons, the last two weekends before this one felt like we had hardly done anything. We tried to change that this weekend and we have got a few days booked off at the end of the week to hit the plot again (and make them both look nicer for the allotment competition judge who will be coming round soon!)
Since the last update we have decided to try and put a better path down 118, it currently has just a black membrane down and frankly looks a bit rubbish. It doesn’t help we’ve been piling weeds on there to dry out in the sun so it looked a mess and really needed sorting. To that end I have been scavaging a few flags (17 at the last count) which have been an absolute pain to move around, I had no idea how heavy they were. I set to work laying a few of those this weekend whilst Pilla bravely tackled weeding the whole of 118. It’s a huge plot but Pilla is very efficient with the hoe and managed to get the lot done. We both weeded the front after that and the plot looks way better for it.
We now have a nice new sign on the front of the plot from the Society – the dreaded ‘Hosepipe Ban’ sign. Our plots are pretty close to taps and we don’t really water that much outside of the greenhouse so hopefully it shouldn’t effect us too much. We did feel sorry for the people who have to walk down past a few plots to get to a tap. In the heat that is not a fun job! We really have noticed the lack of rain, the ground is very dry, but it’s doesn’t look like our plants are suffering too much at the moment.
We spent the few hours we had on Sunday on the plot sorting the greenhouse. It was really packed with chilli, sweet pepper and aubergine plants to the extent you couldn’t really get in there. This is not great for a variety of reasons not least that the fruits in there need light to ripen. This was a much bigger job than we thought, we pulled out all the Jalapeno, Cayenne, Padron, Sweet, Marconi, Chili, Twilight, Black Pearl and Habanero Peppers – we must have 4 or 5 of each. Most of them needed staking and some we decided to give away, but once they got a good watering they got placed back in the greenhouse with a lot more room and hopefully a lot more light.
We have been taking loads of produce off the plot. We must have had about 2 kilo’s of strawberries so far, including this rather interesting looking fella. I’m not sure if we should have censored it or not! Alongside the mountains of strawberries have been getting an almost equal amount of raspberries. Seeing how many we got this year, I’m not sure we needed to buy the second variety we got earlier in the year, next year we’ll be swamped! We’ve also had (in no order) turnips, cauliflowers, carrots, courgettes and cucumbers (you really forget how many of these you get. It’s madne, ss), potatoes, red currants, blackberries and more lettuce than we could possibly eat. Ace.
To say sorry again I’ve made a video on what Plot 97 has done this year. You lucky things.
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!
A mammoth couple of visits over Saturday and Sunday meant that we have ticked quite a few jobs off the ‘things to do’ list. While we didn’t have much sunshine (not totally unexpected for a British bank holiday weekend!) it was great weather for getting lots done and plot 118 was our focus. On Saturday, Neil planted out the last of our chitted potatoes, Charlotte this time, whilst I weeded the onion bed. The weather last week has been the perfect combination of warm and wet so there were weeds absolutely everywhere you looked. It’s difficult to know where to start but the priority had to be those beds with produce in them. So next for a blitz was the raspberry bed. They really need to be weed free as they are so shallow rooted so to try and keep on top of it we covered the cleared bed with a few sheets of dampened newspaper and then plenty of hops to form a barrier, which will hopefully last a couple of months. In a lucky twist of timing, Simon was wanting rid of several heavy sheets of tarpaulin so we relieved him of them to lay at the back of the plot where weeds and grass carpet the area. They should provide enough coverage to prevent further growth until we clear that fully, which might not be until next year.
On Sunday we planted out some flowers and evergreen plants that we had bought from the garden centre on Friday, after some more weeding of course! We have some echinops, lupins, tulips, iris and a lovely rhododendron (had to check the spelling on that one!) and Bob very kindly gave us some plants he had grown extra of which should give us plenty of coverage throughout more than just the summer months. Neil completed the front fence in almost record breaking time, but sod’s law meant that as soon as he took the lid off the woodstain to finish the job we had our first shower of rain.
To complete the general tidying up, Neil worked wonders with the area just behind the fence where there were a fair few neglected strawberry plants hidden amongst a mass of weeds. We know from experience that they are hardy little blighters so as he cleared the weeds he replanted the strawberries into their own raised rows. Fingers crossed that they take to their new location as it will mean many more strawbs this year than we first thought!
I managed to get out of any more weeding and set to planting out those seeds that can go straight outside at this time of year. So we now have neat (although not as neat as Bob’s) rows of parsnips (Countess and Imperial Crown), a half row of turnips (Purple Top) which will be successionally sown again later on and three rows of beetroot (Bolthardy, Chioggia and Golden). Lines of string mark them out until we can differentiate the seedlings from the ever appearing weeds. On plot 97 I also planted some 60 day broccoli (Raab) and two types of spinach (Medania and Perpetual).
Having seen everyone elses broad beans popping up outside over the last few weeks it was time to move ours from the coldframe to a bed on plot 118. I planted them out in a block but also included a further block of seeds which should mean a longer crop and greater chance of many more delicious broad beans than last year! Just seen the weather report after the news and there is a risk of frost tonight but hopefully this will be another example of them getting the forecast wrong otherwise some of our good jobs today may be scuppered!
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