by Philippa | Jun 20, 2011 | Allotment
We really feel like we are on top of things on both plots at the moment, which is surprising given our three week absence while on honeymoon. Most of the greenhouse plants have been potted on to their final pots and due to having glazed the new greenhouse some have been moved over to plot 118. We have split all the varieties into both greenhouses, just in case they don’t grow consistently although the new greenhouse seems to be doing its job so far. As a result we seem to have plenty of room for other tasks. Neil has decided to do a little experiment with some rosemary cuttings which he is trying to get rooted. I’m not sure he knows exactly what needs to be done so he has just put them into damp compost! Apparently some rooting/cutting gels have high hormone levels, which is a bit off putting, so we will see what happens without.
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We have managed to take a bumper harvest of fruit home already, including about 1.5kg of raspberries, 750g redcurrants, 500g blackcurrants and 500g strawberries, all of which have been delicious. The blackcurrants, our first harvest off the plant we got about a year ago, are incredibly tart when eaten straight from the bush, so need plenty of sugar adding to any recipe they are being used in. I have a plan for the box we have in kitchen, a combination of cordial (move over Ribena!) and some blackcurrant vodka, which will need three months maturing and so will be in good time for Christmas gifts.
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We would have had more strawberries, and gigantic ones at that, had it not been for some local pest problems. The plants we put in during winter have been growing nicely, with large, upright fruit. They started ripening in the last couple of weeks and we had been looking forward to harvesting them once ready. However, eagle eyed Bob noticed that suddenly there looked to be a lot less fruit on the plants. We’ve come to the conclusion that it is either wood pigeons, squirrels or a rat. Whatever is responsible, it is pretty voracious and has left us with few fruit on the plants in the bed. It is a bit disappointing as it has never been an issue in previous years, but I suppose the wildlife now knows after three years on 97 that it provides a consistent supply of treats!
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Another casualty of the wood pigeons has been the kale and the purple sprouting broccoli, again things we have grown for the last two years without any attacks. We only planted them out about a week ago, having reared them to be big and healthy in the greenhouse and they are now almost stripped bare! This necessitated an emergency dash for some canes and netting and Neil spent a good deal of time constructing frames to keep them covered. Hopefully they will be back to normal in a few weeks, although Neil remains pessimistic! I really hope so as kale has certainly been a good crop in the colder months.
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More planting out this weekend, a Crown Prince squash, very precious as it was the only one that germinated out of the four I sowed. The broad beans, three varieties, Streamline, Red Knight and Moonlight, have been strung up the munty frame and look quite healthy but we have decided we must be a couple of weeks behind some other plot holders who already have flowers appearing on their beans! The Sugarsnap peas are now twisted round the base of a cane structure, these are the second attempt at these this year, as the first ones that I sowed directly into the ground pre wedding were very poor at germinating. Courgettes, Jemmer, Zucchini and Tundi, have gone out too.
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With the leek planting, I’m trying an experiment of my own. The Gardener’s World website reckons on planting them out once they are pencil thickness into holes that are 15-20cm deep and then watering them in so a little of the soil falls back in the hole. Some others (Bob included) reckon that all you need to do is dig them in with a trowel and put the soil right back over it. So we have two rows, one of each method, and we’ll report back if it makes any difference! We hope to still be in as much control of things in the next couple of weeks, but we have this weekend off in Glastonbury so who knows!
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by Neil Wilkinson | Apr 16, 2011 | Allotment
We’ve been slack taking the camera to the allotment lately – hence the lack of updates really. However i’ve just got a nice shiny new one from Pilla, so I went to take some picture mid-week (I had to water too, that season has come around quickly). I’m going to change how I upload pictures too – i used to have them really small for storage reasons on my server, but i’m going to try and use Flickr for them which should allow much bigger images 🙂
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So, what’s new? Well whilst Pilla was busy working this week I managed to plant our early potatoes. I’m planning on doing the rest this week, but it’s pretty hard work digging them in (last year we used Bob’s technique of just using a bulb planter, which is rapid, but our soil is quite compacted and planting them by digging a trench and putting the soil back really breaks it up) . The potatoes are going in the land where the soil pile was, so this is really brand new growing space for us.
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The garlic we planting is shooting up and we have quite a bit growing in the greenhouse, although the squash seeds don’t seem to be doing much yet. The plots are both looking fairly decent now – the cherry tree is in blossom and quite a few of the flowers we planted are starting to bloom.
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We also have our first strawberry flower of the year and the figs are slowly starting to plump up!
I was just looking through the pictures of the new plot when we got it, we’re very proud of how much we’ve done in the last year or so. Since we put the greenhouse up the plot certainly looks ‘done’ (I do need to find some glass to finish it off…)
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by Neil Wilkinson | Oct 10, 2010 | Allotment
First blog for a while, but our inactivity on the website is definitely not reflected on the plot. Last week whilst Pilla was recovering from an injury I decided to get some more flags laid on the path. This decision was helped by the arrival of some chippings which I managed to get a fair few wheelbarrows of, and meant I could nicely finished off one side of the plot. In between laying the flags I also managed to get a couple of big wheelbarrows full of manure and spread it around the recently removed pumpkin patch. The week before we took home the pumpkins and it turned into possibly the biggest harvest we have taken, it literally required a trolley to get it back to the car!
We also started using some of our homw grown compost, which looks really good. We put the first two wheelbarrows on the area where the potatoes were, some of it is full of clay, so now has two or three inches of compost and manure spread out over it.
We knew we had some helpers this weekend and so had planned a few big jobs. The main one was to dig over the ground we uncovered under the old shed and also clear the back corner of the plot. In preparation for this on Saturday I took a few pallets apart and made a place to store some manure, this is going against the back fence and meant we could then clear the ground around it. Whilst i did this today, Pilla, Nic & Ed set about the horrible job of removing all the weeds, glass, bricks, rubble, plastic and old tools in the ground. We spent almost all day doing this, with Nic finishing it off by raking it all level. The plot looks way better for it. I’s now pretty much ready to start building the base for the greenhouse and shed.
… which looked like this before we started today… 
… and this 6 weeks ago … 
We’re pretty please with how it’s all looking now, we don’t really have any areas of huge weediness now, and should have a nice new greenhouse and shed soon. We’re also pretty pleased about how our butternut squash is looking, having never got anything so much as a fruit nubbin last year!
by Philippa | Aug 31, 2009 | Allotment
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!
by Neil Wilkinson | Jun 29, 2009 | Allotment
Before I talk about our plot, something happened to someone else’s plot whilst we were away. I’m not going to talk about the details, but I’m shocked and saddened that anyone would cause that amount of pointless damage. We’ll probably never know what happened, but why anyone would do that to someone who spends so much of his time helping others, welcoming newcomers, generally making everyone feel at home there and being an absolute star on the site is beyond me. Idiots.
Right then, after getting thoroughly de-gunked from the Glastonbury trip (and oh how smug we were walking through the ‘grow your own’ section in the Greenpeace field. Been there, doing that) we headed down to our plot. We’d not been there for six days. Nothing could change that much in six days, right?
Err, wrong. Meet our second cucumber (and the third, fourth, fifth, sixth etc etc are almost ready). It is a monster. It almost doesn’t fit in the fridge. I measured it at 34 cm’s long. I feel we are about to be overwhelmed with cucumbers.
The aubergines in the greenhouse have grown a lot. They look about twice as big as they were last week and quite a few have flowers. We have green tomatoes all over the tomato plants now- the variety in the picture is the stripey Tigerella. Bob looked after our greenhouse plants last week, which is perhaps why they are looking so healthy!
Outside, things seem to have moved up a gear too. We have our first courgette flowers – these grow even faster than cucumbers by all accounts. Pilla has been stocking up on recipes in preparation – I think one is a vegatable muffin which sounds interesting! We have quite a few broadbeans ready to pick, a few sugarsnap peas, the french beans too and the runner beans are slowly developing bean pods.
We also have signs of proper little blueberries. The internet dating we arranged with Debbie’s blueberry bushes has obviously gone well. The carrot tubs are looking very bushy and so we dug up a carrot just to see how they were getting on – Pilla is beautifully modelling a variety. I say ‘variety’ because I think I have mixed up the labels – we have three types, this one should have been ‘Purple Haze’ but it is looking distinctly unpurple right now. We had our first plants bolting in the heat however. We dug up a few mizuna plants because they have grown massive flowers (how a tiny lettuce can grow a three foot flower in six days is beyond me) and the rocket has done the same. They both grow quickly so we intend to sow some more seeds at the weekend.
Apart from running around the plot checking what else has grown, we only did a bit of watering, planted out the Jack o’Lantern squash plant and grabbed a few strawberries before rushing off. Thanks to Bob (again) we got enough strawberries for our pudding this evening.
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