by Neil Wilkinson | Oct 11, 2009 | Allotment
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.
by Neil Wilkinson | Sep 28, 2009 | Allotment
Only a short visit again today. We had the day off (in part to recover from my triathlon. I do like to think if you were to draw a Venn diagram of twenty something, marathon running, allotment owning triathletes that I might be the sole person in the middle!) so it was nice to spend a few hours tending to the allotment when it felt like we should have been at work.
Top of the list of jobs was to harvest more of our produce – it might be almost October but we are still getting really good amounts of tomatoes, peppers, chillis, runner beans, coutgettes and aubergines. We also took our first sweetcorn home (Pilla is proudly displaying her ears in one of the pictures). The sweetcorn was absolutely delicous for lunch!
We’ve got our first little figs forming. Figs are funny things – they set their fruits late in the year, you over winter them inside so they don’t get hit by frost and they then grow on to be ready the next summer. We currently only have about three of them so we are not expecting a bumer harvest next year!
We started clearing out some of the spent plants in the greenhouse. We’ve cut down one of the tomato plants that had no fruit and also composted the disappointing melon plants. The melon plants had taken great delight in spreading leaves everywhere but had been very reluctant to produce anything remotely melon-like. We then added some manure to the front bed and planted some crocuses and snow drops – they should add a bit of colour to the plot late in the winter.
by Neil Wilkinson | Sep 13, 2009 | Allotment
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!
by Neil Wilkinson | Sep 6, 2009 | Allotment
Well, it only seems like a few weeks ago that we were busy potting on and planting out but now we are well into our autumn jobs. Today’s big task was to remove the sweet peas that have given our plot a good splash of colour for the last few months.
Whilst Pilla was getting busy with the secateurs (and running away from the spiders that seem to love hiding out in the sweet peas. In fairness to Pilla the spiders were huge, I mean they must have been at least the size of a small pea) I set about tidying up the greenhouse. We had let it all get a bit overgrown and there were plenty of old leaves hanging around in there. Annoyingly enough, there were also plenty of big fat caterpillars eating our tomatoes and aubergines.
We are still getting lots of things from our greenhouse, in fact I think we had our biggest harvest in there today. For all our cutting down things, we do still have the odd burst of colour, with the flowers at the front of the plot doing their best to last into the autumn.
The only other thing left to do was add in some more manure onto the recently emptied beds and that was it for today.
by Neil Wilkinson | Aug 9, 2009 | Allotment
We didn’t have long to spend at the plot this weekend with travelling to Scotland on Saturday but the time we spent there seemed very productive. Our first priority was a bit of damage limitation. The tumbling tomatoes we had outside were well and truly hit by blight which is a real shame as they were so heavy with fruit. We picked those that were blemish free in the hope that they may ripen at home, fingers crossed. The carrots have been in poor shape for a couple of weeks now. The leaves started to wilt and go brown and despite some extra watering and feeding they never revived. We are still not sure what caused this, but there are a number of possible suspects, including carrot fly, insufficient watering or poor soil quality. A mass cull was in order as most of those we pulled were soft and mushy, not characteristics usually associated with carrots! We did manage to salvage a handful but it is pretty disappointing and we hope to improve things next year.
On to the produce we are having success with, it was time to harvest the garlic. The stems had collapsed and yellowed which is a sign that they are ready, although it does briefly induce panic that they have all died! Neil dug the bulbs up keeping the stems attached for hanging purposes. There were a couple of tiddlers but the vast majority were healthy and plump. We laid them out in the greenhouse to thoroughly dry out for a week or two then we will store them in a dark cupboard at home ready for some yummy recipes! The greenhouse is looking lush with lots on the verge of being ready to harvest. Neil had to tie up a few of the aubergine plants because it was so heavy with fruit. A few will probably ready to pick next weekend if the weather stays warm. The peppers are really rocketing. Each plant has about ten or fifteen fruit with more flowers that will develop later. According to Grow Your Own magazine, each sweet pepper plant should produce between three and eight peppers so we are doing pretty well by their account. We picked a few of the bigger ones as they looked ready to eat and we didn’t want the smaller peppers to be deprived of nutrients.
The lettuces that we sowed a couple of weeks ago in the greenhouse were ready for potting on. The germination rate was really high so we were running out of room on the greenhouse staging. This lead to us planting some straight out with a sprinkling of slug pellets to deter any feasting. The timing couldn’t be better as we have used almost all of our first round of lettuces so hopefully it won’t be long before these are ready for cutting.
After a generous watering of all of the beds it was time to call it a day. Before we headed home I picked some of the sweet pea flowers. Some of the stems are looking a bit weak like they might be coming to the end of their flowering season and as they have provided some much needed colour to the plot for a good few weeks it seemed time to let them do the same at home.
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