by Neil Wilkinson | Aug 2, 2009 | Allotment
Despite the nice weather the allotment was pretty quiet and those two factors brought a constant companion to us today. The table we rescued from the bins is proving to be a bit of a sun trap – and at our allotment where there is sun, a place to lie and a few cat treats you will probably find Tammy. She’s a soppy little thing.
Tammy wasn’t the only creature on the plot today, we saw plenty of bees on our dahlias, a few ladybirds and about a million snails climbing up the bean frame. We are not supposed to like snails at the alloment and the bigger ones regularly get launched over the fench into the rough ground at the side of our plot, but when they look like this little fella, it’s sort of hard not to.
Again we didn’t have that much to do today. We fed the plants in the greenhouse, did some weeding and then harvested some more produce. Today we have taken home runner beans, tomatoes, courgettes (which Pilla is currently cooking up into a courgette casserole) salad leaves, mint, potatoes, cucumbers and sugar snap peas.
The beetroot is almost ready and our chillis are finally growing. I put the pictures of these together because I was talking to Ralph on Saturday, and not only did he give me a big bag full of tomatoes (thanks Ralph!), but he talked about a chilli and beetroot pickle he made last year. Pickles, beetroot and chillis – surely you can’t go wrong with that combination! We are going to have to make that this year.
Back in the greenhouse we got out first full truss of tomatoes – I think the variety is ‘Gardeners Delight’. The aubergines are growing at a fair pace and the sweet peppers have almost exploded. We have four plants and there must be 10-15 peppers on each.
Thought I’d also share the success of the growing frame (it’s known as a munty frame – I got the design from a web forum) as it is now producing tons of very straight runner beans and they are easy to pick too because they all hang down beneath the frame. Brilliant. The garlic we picked last week has dried out nicely in the greenhouse, and I think we can start digging up the rest of the garlic next week.
by Neil Wilkinson | May 17, 2009 | Allotment
Well it had to happen. For the first time since we got the allotment we left early today because it was raining. Well I blame the rain, but us both being a bit tired and grumpy didn’t help either. I won’t say who was worse, we both know who it was and we try and operate a no blame culture on the allotment. The tiredness was caused by us both taking part in the Manchester 10km Run today so it was handily timed that we didn’t have a massive amount to do on the plot this weekend.
First up yesterday was the Saturday morning chicken feed and a brief stop to see what needed to be done on the allotment. We really should have learnt by now that ‘brief’ and ‘allotment’ don’t really fit in the same sentence. We popped back after lunch and planted out the red cabbages and in the same bed propped up some of the weaker purple sprouting broccoli we planted out last weekend. I tied up some of the sweet peas that hadn’t quite attached themselves to the strings we are growing them up and set about drilling holes in the bins we are going to put the tomatoes in. These are old bins from Pearson and with half a grow bag in each and good drainage holes they should make fairly decent homes for the toms. We grew way too many of each variety and so have been looking to give a few away, which we managed, but not without taking a few different varieties back. It’s one of the many nice things about allotment life that people are very generous about what they grow. So now we have 9 (that’s nine) varieties of tomatoes. I’m fairly sure that come the summer we’ll be able to keep half of Manchester in tomatoes and still have buckets full for ketchup. Sharon from the plot next door (that’s 3 mentions in two weeks!) very kindly gave us some marigolds which we should try and plant out next week – and Bob gave us a gooseberry bush, which despite a warning from him, still managed to attack Pilla with it’s thorns.
We spent Sunday afternoon planting lots of our tomatoes into the large pots and putting a cane in each, ready for their final positions in the greenhouse. We had a bit of a lesson in tomato growing from Bob on Saturday, so we picked out the side shoots as we potted them on. Pilla planted out the remaining beetroot – we found a forgotten seed packet last weekend, and I started planting out some of the sugarsnap peas we had growing in the greenhouse. I’m not convinced that they will be particularly successful (they were a bit leggy and we didn’t harden them off) so we planted some extra peas in with the plants just in case. I only got 4 done before the heavens opened and we hastily retreated to the greenhouse.
Unfortunately the rain meant that we couldn’t take any pictures which is a shame as we seem to have had lots successfully growing this week – in the greenhouse our courgettes, sweetcorn and lettuces have all sprouted, and our cucumbers, peppers, aubergines and dahlia’s are all looking good. With a bit of luck they will be doing just as well next week.
And finally, after months of hard graft, countless hours, and many many dirty fingernails, some produce from the plot finally landed on our plates! Step forward some spare Mizuna plants, whose leaves added a home grown touch to some salad we had on Saturday night. Ok, it’s not much but hopefully it’s a sign of things to come!
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!
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