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.
by Philippa | Jul 13, 2009 | Allotment
Colour all round at the allotment and mainly sunshine yellow hues! We have blooming sunflowers, opening courgette flowers and a pre-allotment breakfast of little eggs from the chickens. After the monthly allotment meeting yesterday we got straight to work. I was potting on the chillies into the florist buckets as they had started to flower and the hope is that with a bit more room we might get some fruit on them at the end of the season. We ran out of compost before I could do the same for all of the habaneros so this remains on the list of things to do. Meanwhile, Neil put his DIY skills to the test and set about drilling large holes out of a tall bin which he then partially filled with compost. He then carefully planted the strawberry plants Bob gave us so that theyare hanging out of the holes. The bin will be further filled once the runners in our strawberry beds are established. These won’t fruit until next year but they really couldn’t wait in their small pots any longer.
Exciting things happening in the greenhouse. We have a few little sweet peppers emerging, see above for our largest specimen thus far. If they continue at this rate we will get a good return from our four plants which will be a bonus as I think we were sceptical we would get anything at all. Neil had some aubergine tickling to do, with the help of a second hand paint brush. This followed a week of research in which opinion seemed to be divided. Some aubergines are apparently self pollinating whilst others require a bit of a helping hand. Not knowing whether ours were the former or the latter we thought it was better to play it safe and give them a tickle inside their flowers to distribute their pollen. Fingers crossed for the results! It was also time to plant out the dill and sage that had been started in the greenhouse. They are both looking a bit leggy so hopefully some fresh air will strengthen them up. A special mention goes to a new addition to our allotment equipment in the form of an old desk we recycled from beside the bins in our flat! Very useful for potting and DIY tasks but it may need a coat of varnish so it doesn’t perish.
It has been a good week for harvesting produce with a lots of lettuce and beans to bring home and I must say it is making us feel very healthy and virtuous! There is nothing quite like the taste of a fresh homegrown raspberry.
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 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!
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