by Neil Wilkinson | Jul 19, 2009 | Allotment
Exciting times at the allotment this week – not only did we harvest almost more crops than we could carry, but Pilla got to use her new trug:
As you can see it’s pretty full up. I have to admit that the trug is quite useful – and it looks the part when Pilla is carrying it, I’m just not sure I can pull off the look! The full list of it’s content is:
- Sugar snap peas
- 3 yellow courgettes
- Runner beans
- Dwarf French beans
- Broad beans
- 3 types of lettuce
- 2 cucumbers
- A handful of carrots
- Thyme
- Raspberries
Sunday was exciting for different reasons – there was a lesson from Bob and Walter on how to prepare vegetables for the annual show. The first weekend we spent at the allotments was at the annual show last year (you can see that here) – and we did wonder if we might have produce to show this year. We probably will, but won’t be challenging for a prize (we had a sneaky peak at Debbie’s onions and shallots and they must be about three times the size of ours) and unfortunately Pilla’s appeals for a category of our own for wonky vegetables was rejected!
After the show meeting we braved the rain to rattle through our list of jobs. I added a few more strawberry runners to the first bin I cut holes from last week. We have two of these to fill and thankfully our strawberry plants are going crazy producing runners for us to use. Using these bins will give us an extra half bed for other things next year and we should have lots more strawberries than this year. Pilla was busy digging up our bed of shallots – they had got a bit of a pounding in the heavy rain this week and didn’t look likely to recover and their leaves had been yellowing for a while. We got a pretty good number from them but they are pretty small – they are currently drying out in our spare room.
We also planted out the remaining habenero chillies, melons and some more basil and sowed more of our lettuce varieties. We didn’t manage to take a lot of pictures today – a lot of the time we were hiding out in the greenhouse sheltering from the rain. I did manage to venture to the front border – the dahlia’s that Mike from work gave me are looking great. Back in the greenhouse we are about to have a glut of peppers, we have four plants and each one probably has 10 peppers on it. We also have our first proper chilli growing – finally!
In between rain showers (actually just when the rain got a bit lighter) I planted some green manure in the bed vacated by the shallots and Pilla planted our some more radishes. We were pretty damp at this point so called it day.
by Neil Wilkinson | Jul 5, 2009 | Allotment
The chickens we jointly look after have got their laying groove on – we found three eggs on Saturday and another two today. We had a further six waiting for us in the allotment fridge, as you can see they are a massive assortment of sizes and shapes but all the better for that I think. If we wanted perfect looking food I suppose we could just go to the supermarket – but that would mean missing the excitement of rooting around nest boxes!
Our harvest from the allotment is now notching up a gear – this week we’ve taken home a lot of new potatoes, cucumbers, mint, raspberries, broad beans, sugar snap peas and a few different lettuces. Most of this produce has been eaten straightaway – only some of the broad beans have had to go in the freezer. The lettuce has been really successful and was delicious with tonight’s dinner.
We only spent a few hours at the plot late this afternoon – after the morning run for Pilla’s half-marathon training we had a nap – it’s taken us a week, and we still haven’t recovered from Glastonbury! Luckily the plot is taking care of itself a lot these days so we just had a bit of allotment ‘admin’ to do – weeding, watering, a tiny bit of planting out and adding support to some of the plants. I tied up the sweet peas at the front of the plot whilst Pilla took the weeds out of all the beds. The advantage that we got when we took on this plot was the lack of weeds – it took around an hour but Pilla managed to weed the whole plot.
I also added a bit of support to the tomatoes – some of which are now up to the roof of the greenhouse. After some watering and feeding that was pretty much us done. I think we might have spent longer harvesting our crops and taking pictures than we did doing ‘proper’ jobs – that’s how allotment life should be I think!
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.
by Neil Wilkinson | Jun 21, 2009 | Allotment
I’m afraid it’s only going to be a short update this week. Partly because we didn’t have very much to do and partly because the space bar doesn’t work properly on our laptop anymore so writing is a bit of a pain.
Thought we would share how the allotment animals are getting on first. The six chickens are now pretty big – and on Friday one of them laid their first egg! They are very friendly things – they are always clucking at you and investigating what you are doing. Bob has made a huge new chicken run for them, so they have been out enjoying that all day today. Of the few cats prowling round our site, the only two that come near to our plot are Tammy and Tommy, both girls, Tammy is the friendly one and Tommy is a bit more skittish. Yesterday when we went to water our toms, we managed to get a picture of Tommy sat on the staging in our greenhouse. She is actually perched on a pair of gloves we had left out!
We harvested our first cucumber – and very tasty it was too. I have a feeling we will be overrun with these soon, this one grew in less than a week and there are quite a few others at the same stage this week. I had last Monday off work and decided to create a small pond made out of the bottom of a blue barrel we had rescued from the skip a few months ago. Today I finished the digging, filled it, and placed some logs around it. We will get a few more of these logs around it over the next few weeks. To be honest, I am not sure how well this pond will do – it’s small, and it is surrounded by gravel. Time will tell I suppose.
Philippa was busy planting out the sunflowers and hunting for the mushrooms that seem to be thriving in the warm wet weather. We have a million lavender plants that needed potting on and lots of our crops needed a bit of a feed.
We have our first dwarf beans and sugar snap peas growing. There are not many at the moment, maybe by the time we get back from Glastonbury there might be a few more.
We also have our first aubergine flower – and the pepper plants we potted on last week seem to be thriving, you can see the start of the flowers now on several of them. We managed to take some more food off the plot today – a plate full of new potatoes, mint and some rocket.
by Philippa | Jun 7, 2009 | Allotment
It was all set to be a rather cold, wet and lonely allotment experience today as Neil is ‘working’ in Abu Dhabi. And so while he was on the beach in 40 degree heat I was putting on the layers to brave the wintery conditions that befell Manchester this week. Which meant that it was a lovely surprise to be visited by Pete and Suzy and the boys (‘hello William and Alex!). I think that we have two budding gardeners on our hands as they seemed to know what lots of the plants are and were keen to explore the ones that they hadn’t seen before. Alex seems to have an affinity with the chickens but we drew the line at allowing him into the chicken run despite his requests!
I seemed to have quite a few jobs to do today, I think perhaps Neil engineered this for the week that he is away to keep me busy! So what with the monthly meeting first thing this morning it meant it was a longer day at the plot than expected and ironically when I left at 4.45pm it was the best weather of the day.
Good news in the greenhouse – our first fledgling tomato! No, I am not hallucinating, look closer and you will see a little green nubbin of a tomato. Ahh, so proud. Most of the other plants have yellow flowers on, so I gave them all some tomato food. We will have to keep feeding them about once a week from now on.
Our coldframe was stuffed to the brim so it was time to plant out the courgettes. We have both green (Zucchini) and yellow (F1 Jemmer). Courgette plants are notorious for producing a huge amount, the more you pick the more they grow, so I only planted out two of each colour and even then it might be a bit of a squeeze once they start getting bushy. A handy tip from our current issue of Grow Your Own magazine is to sink the top half of a plastic juice bottle upside down into the soil near the base of the plants so that they can be fed and watered via this direct to their roots as they are quite greedy. No sooner had I planted the courgettes out the coldframe was full again! This week the sweetcorn and curly kale are being hardened off.
The next job was a bit of a rescue attempt. Neil had planted out the peas and the dwarf beans in the last fortnight and they were quite ‘leggy’. Neil ran some twine round the peas to encourage them to twist around but had run out of time to do the same with the beans. They seemed like they were perking up a bit last week but in the meantime there has been almost torrential rain for a couple of days so when I arrived on site today they were almost horizontal on the soil! I managed to tease the peas a bit taller on the string but they were actually winding round quite well. I also planted a few extra peas along the line as they can be planted quite tightly. I then ran some string around the beans and threaded them through and they look much better already. In fact one of the plants has its first flower so maybe in the next few weeks they will all be blooming!
Lastly, I planted out some red and green lettuce (lollo rosso and lollo biondi) from the greenhouse and the gem lettuces that Bob kindly gave us a few weeks ago. Fingers crossed they don’t look too tempting a treat for any birds/slugs/mice! Next week will involve more planting out of things from the coldframe and maybe some potting on in the greenhouse but it really does feel like we are on the home straight and the greenhouse is looking positively empty in comparison with the last few months. All we need now are things to eat!
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