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.
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.
[flickr]photo:5853201119[/flickr]
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!
[flickr]photo:5853751726[/flickr]
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.
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.
[flickr]photo:5853184071[/flickr]
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!
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 🙂
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.
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.
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…)
…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.
You know it’s summer when you have your first strawberries, when you can can a BBQ without it raining and when the England football team are playing badly – all three of which happened on Saturday.
Saturday afternoon at the allotment was great, we celebrated the nice weather with our first allotment bbq – featuring our own produce and some homemade burgers from home – delicious! Before we could tuck into that we did have some work to do. Pilla planted out the courgettes across both plots and weeded a fair bit of plot 118.
I spent a while in the greenhouse attaching the tomatoes to their supports, it doesn’t seem that long ago we planted them on but a couple had go so big they had toppled over a bit. On Sunday we had another move about in the greenhouse, taking down the staging at the side of the greenhouse so we could spread the peppers and tomatoes out and attached the tomato supports to the greenhouse.
After the great weather on Saturday, the forecast was a bit more dodgy today. We managed to get a fair bit done though, Pilla had a good weed on the side of plot 97 and I planted out our cabbages over on plot 118. We had a good weed around there too, covering the onion bed and generally all over as the soil had quite a lot of little weed seedlings growing. The good news was the that rain overnight seemed to have given the beetroots some life, we were complaining two weeks ago they hadn’t germinated well, we planted some more (which have all now germinated too) and lo and behold we turn up today and there are tons of little seedlings. We’ll probably have hundreds of beetroots now! The lettuces are looking great, we’ve been taking loads off them lately (they have provided three lunches and lots of side salads with tea this week) and they are still massive.
One salad that didn’t grow well was the red spinach, it seemed to go straight from seedling to seed head, it was the fastest bolting thing we’ve ever grown. We dug it up today and replanted, I’ve read something on the Internet (which I don’t really believe, but anyway) that plants are more likely to go to seed as the days are getting longer, has the days shorted the risk recedes. We’ll see how that goes.
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!
Recent Comments