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 14, 2009 | Allotment
It was a long time coming but we have had our first allotment tea! In fact, the lamb was the only component that we had not grown ourselves – not worked out how to grow a lamb in a raised bed just yet! We had grilled lamb steaks with new potatoes, rocket and mizuna salad and mint and basil pesto. Dessert was ten sweet and juicy strawberries shared between us. The new potatoes were an unexpected bonus as we didn’t really know that they would be ready to harvest. However, our impatience was getting the better of us and we decided to empty one of the tubs we had planted a spare Charlotte potato in. We knew that this could have meant sacrificing this plant needlessly if the tubers were not ready but we felt that it was worth it and boy was it worth it! I counted 18 potatoes out as Neil rooted around in the soil to check we hadn’t missed any. If our other plants have such good yeilds we will have more potatoes than we know what to do with!
Quite a busy day at the plot today with lots of jobs completed, all in the scorching sunshine. We planted out the sweetcorn and the curly kale that had been hardened off in the coldframe. Both were sturdy enough not to need any support at this stage, but we will keep an eye on them for the next few weeks to make sure they continue to prosper. The sunflowers took their place in the frame for the coming week. Not quite sure where they will be planted out when the time comes as space is rapidly running out!
It was renovation time in the greenhouse due to the flourishing tomato and cucumber plants. They were all getting wider as well as taller so Neil took apart the two sides of staging and spread them out a bit more. He then used cable ties to fasten the vertical support canes to two horizontal canes rested in our greenhouse fixings. This has really strengthened them up which is important for when the plants start to fruit as they cannot hold up the weighty fruit bearing trusses without help. We potted on the aubergines and peppers and all the resulting black tubs in the greenhouse have been connected to the water butt irrigation system. There is very little left in the greenhouse now that is not staying there and what remains we potted on this afternoon – chillies, squash, basil and alpine strawberries.
There are signs of things to come all over the plot now, with more tomato nubbins, fledgling cucumbers, tiny broad bean pods and flowers blossoming. All very exciting and after seeing the tasty meal we made tonight it is enough to make your stomach rumble in anticipation!
by Neil Wilkinson | May 10, 2009 | Allotment
We have spent a lot of time at the allotment this weekend, which has been nice and despite thinking that we didn’t have too many jobs to do we haven’t really stopped! Yesterday, we had to do a lot of weeding. This week has brought a snowstorm effect of ‘dandelion clocks’ blowing all over the whole site and everywhere they land they seem to germinate in a matter of days. Being at the end of the row of plots means that we seem to have more than our fair share! There is absolutely no prospect of weeding them all out but we have turned over the areas of unplanted soil to stop them in their tracks. But weeds are not the only things that have been growing as our plants are doing quite well. We have some berries on our redcurrant bushes (although admittedly they are more like greencurrants at the minute!) and the radishes continue to thrive. If you look close enough at the photo of the radishes you can see the sprouted dandelions, the little blighters! Our potatoes continue to grow furiously and to protect against any cold snaps and to give them as much growing depth as possible we piled soil around the leaves. This will be an ongoing job as they get taller or until we run out of soil to pack them in!
The rest of yesterday was taken up with feeding and cleaning out the chickens (cue Neil climbing into the chicken coop to get at the hard to reach spots!) and also helping Simon with some digging. We hope that it is good allotment karma to help out others if we don’t have that much to do on our own plot and three people digging certainly makes more progress than one. It was a lovely evening which meant that we only really noticed the time once our stomachs started to rumble at half past five!
Today was another early start due to the AGM. This passed without too much political unrest but was noteworthy for ourselves as a new Treasurer was needed. So I stepped up and won by a landslide (although I was without an opponent!). We had to have a lot of things explained to us by Susan, the retiring Treasurer and I am sure that there will be a lot more that we have to learn on the job but today is officially day one in office!
Following the meeting and a healthy amount of gossip we got down to some actual work. Neil has been researching various methods of growing climbing beans on the internet and happened upon the Munty frame. It has a short and a taller side, with the short side facing North, and pieces of bamboo connecting the two. Vertical pieces of string run from the base of the short side and then across the slanted top which the beans can be trained up. This makes the beans hang down from the plants so that they have room to grow and are easier to harvest and has the advantage of leaving the bed underneath free for other produce. Neil used spare wood from Site 1, bamboo canes and twine and it kept him busy for most of the afternoon. We will probably be putting the beans out towards the end of May.
I spent the day planting, both outside and in the greenhouse. Inside I planted melons, pumpkins/squashes and a mixture of lettuce. Outside I planted pak choi, red and green lettuce and some oriental salad, leaving some stripy soil so we know where they are! Ignore the rather pathetic looking mizuna in the photo below, it was only planted out yesterday and is still acclimatising-or at least that is what I am telling myself!
Another late finish today, we only left at 6pm but this was partly due to having to wrestle with some netting to go over the purple sprouting broccoli we put out yesterday. We are told the woodpidgeons are partial to such plants and we didn’t want to lose any during the week. We will have to consider a better way of netting them before next weekend but we were simply too impatient for our dinner to stay any longer!
by Neil Wilkinson | May 4, 2009 | Allotment
We took advantage of the long weekend to get absolutely loads done off our ever changing to-do list. We managed to get to the allotment on each of the last three days (although once was just to feed the chickens and let them out).
One thing we seem to have no trouble growing are these mushrooms. They take advantage of the wet and warm weather we’ve been having and sneak up around your plot when you are not looking. They take about 4 seconds to grow. Ok, maybe not quite that quick but you get the idea. We had about 8 of the blighters to add to the compost heap. We’d planted some broad beans and sweet peas out last week, which were our first transplanted seeds, so the first job was to check they are ok and they seem to be thriving. We’ve been having nightmares all week about hoards of roaming slugs coming to devour them!
Next up I set about planting more sweet peas across the front of the plot and up the fence and Pilla planted a few of the seeds we were a bit late starting off in the greenhouse, sweetcorn and courgettes. Pilla then started the epic task of transplanting seeds in the greenhouse. Pretty much everything we have planted is doing well so we had a lot of things to move into bigger pots, which included: lots of different tomato varieties, peppers, cauliflowers, sunflowers, cucumbers, basil, parsley and sweet majoram. It’s a fairly time consuming process and you have to make some life and death decisions over which seedlings to keep and which go to the great compost heap in the sky. It was carnage.
After adding a third water butt next to the greenhouse with some bricks from Sharon’s plot we called it a day (hi Sharon!). Today we caught up with planting the things we should have put out in late April. The big thing to get planted were the carrots. We’ve sort of run out of bed space for them so we have planted them in a selection of sqaure Pearson bins – which all had to be cleaned out, drilled, lined with membrane, and then layered up with gravel, soil and stone free soil. We now have three varieties sown – regular, round and purple. Whilst I was doing this Pilla was on a mad planting spree – filling up beds with a couple of types of beetroot and spring onions.
We have lots of things growing outside now – our parsnips have germinated and are doing so well we had to thin them down. We have had to do the same with the radishes and leaf beet. Our red and white onions have started sprouting and some potatoes are starting to appear above the soil. Other less desirable things are growing too – the plot has sprouted quite a lot of weeds. The raised beds help quite a lot with weeding because you can sit on the edge of one and reach across quite easily.
We have about a million spiders in our greenhouse and they were temporarily joined today by a butterfly, who was reading the seed packet and complaining about vague spacing instructions I think!
by Neil Wilkinson | Apr 12, 2009 | Allotment
We didn’t really have any major jobs to do this weekend (and last Monday too) but it started to dawn on us during the week that we had set a lot of our seeds aside to be planted in April and now we are almost halfway through the month. This prompted a burst of planting activity today. On Friday we delicately transported the batch of seeds we’d started in the flat over the last few weeks and already today they seemed to be much happier in the greenhouse, they definitely get more light there than on our windowsill.
We are still really just guessing when to plant things and we like to get caught up in the slight panic that seems to sweep over the plots at this time of year (“oh, they have potatoes in, should we put ours in?”). So today we have sown, in no particular order:
- Parsnips
- Leaf beet
- Sugarsnap peas
- French dwarf beans
- Runner beans
- Dill
- Sage
- Basil
- Thyme
- Sunflowers
- Fuschia
- Tomatoes
We’ve had limited success starting off peppers & chillies indoors at home so we are trying some more in the greenhouse. Over the last week we have also put our potatoes in. We are experimenting with them, we have some in the beds and some in tubs.
We probably would have got more done but we had to buy some supplies from Bob at the store which entailed a walk across the site. This is not a fast process at the best of times as you tend to have a bit of a chat (and I’ll be honest here, a bit of a nosey at what everyone else is doing with their plots) but when Philippa is with you AND she is giving out shortbread then the 5 minute walk turns into an hour long meander. This is not an exaggeration.
We took the opportunity to plant some bee attracting plants that Mum gave me (thanks Mum) although one of them is looking a little bit lonely at the moment:
The rest of the plot is getting slightly more colourful everytime we go, although I have cheated slightly by taking super close up’s of these:
Garlic and shallots:
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