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!
by Neil Wilkinson | Jun 2, 2009 | Allotment
.. which means this post is going to be an epic one. We’ve had a very busy few days, helping people move house, cycling to Liverpool, shopping for my week in the Middle East, so we have not spent too much time at the plot. Which is a shame because the weather has been perfect for it, however the advantage is that when we went tonight the plot seems to have kicked off it’s shoes, soaked up the sun and generally been having a fine time of it.
So, may we present for you a full on photo tour of our tiny piece of former car park in Manchester… (I’m not going to talk about all of them, it would take me all night!)
The broad bean flowers are a big hit with the local bee population.
The dwarf french beans are not looking great, but I only planted them out yesterday so I’m hopeful they will harden up over the next few days.
Before having an allotment I don’t think I’d ever seen a potato plant and now I’ve seen a potato flower. Aww, isn’t it cute?
The mixed lettuces look great. Which reminds me, I need to google how plants photosynthesize with red leaves.
Lots of our fruit is starting to ripen. We definitely didn’t plant enough strawberries this year, next year I think we will do them in some big bins we have with holes cut in the side. I think we’ll get more plants, more varieties and a more efficient use of our space.
Things in the greenhouse are going well. The tomato plants are big (and have lots of flowers) and the cucumber plants are so big they are starting to frighten me.
Our flowers make a big difference to the plot, I think we will grow more next year.
And this is what it is all about. We got our first proper vegetables in the form some radishes (and also learnt a vital lession in remembering to wash our produce before eating. Mmm soiley). And if you want you can play a fun game with the last picture – try and count the number of different varieties of plants. I count 30.
by Neil Wilkinson | May 25, 2009 | Allotment
I’m not sure where we would be on the allotment without the bank holidays – we spent two days doing allotment jobs and half a day shopping for allotment goodies this weekend. In fact, we got so much done this weekend that I think I will temporarily leave the descriptive posts we’ve been doing behind and try listing everything we got done instead.
Saturday
- Fed chickens and opened up the coop
- Bought bedding plants, flowers and organic slug pellets from garden centre
- Bought replacement trowel (my digging is so fierce I broke the first one on the very first use. Plastic and metal is no match for me) and water butt irrigation system from B&Q
Sunday
- Planted out the cauliflowers
- Planted out the lemon thyme, french thyme and oregano
- Moved the greenhouse shelves into the shed and had a general tidy up both shed and greenhouse
- With Tom, built netting around cauliflowers to protect from woodpigeons
- Set up drip irrigation system to the water butt. This should make watering our greenhouse plants a bit easier. (More information on this another week I think)
- Pilla and Nic weeded the plot
- Pilla and Nic planted out some of the bedding plants
- Neil planted out the new flowering blue scabious (sounds horrible, is very pretty)
- Pilla added some of the slug pellets
- Put chickens to bed
Monday
- Planted out all of the remaining bedding plants together with the marigolds from Sharon across the front of the plot, into two old hanging boxes we had and across the rear of the plot
- Created hanging boxes for flowers & possibly tomatoes
- Planted out three lavender plants
- Planted out runner beans onto the new munty frame
- Potted on two cucumbers to their final pots
- Potted on kale, basil, two sets of courgettes and more tomatoes
- Put dahlia, french beans and some basil into the cold frame
- Thinned out all the carrot containers
- Thinned out lettuces
- Added more manure to the poo pile
And finally done. Phew! We also have another job to do after this weekend – build somewhere shady and cool. So much of our time has been spent being cold over winter I think we completely forgot how hot allotmenting can get. We have nowhere shady to hide and I think we should try and resolve this, particularly after a little bit of sunburn for both of us yesterday in spite of our suncream!
Special thanks to Tom and Nic for their help on Sunday and for the refreshments they brought, particularly the banana muffins! Allotmenting is much more fun with friends.
by Neil Wilkinson | Mar 30, 2009 | Allotment
I have to be careful writing this post. Sunday was a lovely day down on the plot – bright sunshine, warm, good banter, cold beer – really the sort of afternoons specifically designed for being on the allotment. Unfortunately, Pilla didn’t get to enjoy any of it as she spent about 12 hours stuck inside working. So I’m going to try and downplay how nice it was…
I got there before lunch and had a couple of good jobs to get on with. The big one to tick off the list was to create some new little flower beds around the far corner of the plot and up near the apple tree. The far corner of the plot is an odd little spot, we had thought about putting a pond there (and still might put a small one in at some point in the future) but because it’s open to the space outside the site we get a bit of litter blown in and it had become a bit messy. We want to attract some wildlife too and it really wasn’t going to in the state it was in. We have a few old floorboards behind the shed, they have been on the plot since we took it over – the longer pieces got transformed into the fence but we still have some left. It took me a while – lots of cups of tea and thinking time was required. There was also a lot to see today – something must have been in the water in Abbey Hey recently because there has been a fence building spree on Site 3 – so I had to go have a nosey. As much as I like my pallet fence gate, I am definitely a bit jealous of Debbie’s new home made gate. It is faaancy! So here are our new beds, hopefully I’m going to add a few logs to the log pile to make it a bit more wild.
The beds also took a while because Chris brought me out a cold beer when I’d almost finished. This is exactly what you need when you’ve been building things in the allotment all day. He’s also given me a latch for the cold frame so we can prop it open properly. Legend :).
After they were done I had a few smaller jobs to do. We’d been to the plot on Saturday afternoon to plant some horseradish roots (in bins – they are virulent growers) which needed to be distributed around the plot. I then cleaned out the Pearson bins and filled up the manure bay. It’s taken a good amount of manure to get it two thirds full – this will hopefully provide us with enough rotted manure in the autumn for the whole plot.
I also planted some more seedlings. Some of the seedlings have finally appeared – maybe they heard me moaning about them last week. I forgot to take any pictures so you’ll just have to take my word for it. So far there seems to be little difference between peat and no-peat but it’s early days (thanks for the GW info mum!).
Our shallots have really come on leaps and bounds and the rhubarb is growing at a quite frankly frightening pace. It has become a monster. It’s looking pretty tasty already!
Tammy was spotted throughout the day enjoying the warmth of our greenhouse and the nice bed that Pilla created in the dark depths of winter. She alternated between sleeping in her bed and stretching out across the pallet we still have in there. She was incredibly warm!
We have a busy weekend next weekend with Paris and all – however we have both booked Monday off work which should be for me to recover, but I’m sure I can do that at the allotment, right?
by Philippa | Mar 1, 2009 | Allotment
Today being the 1st of March it was appropriate that there was a definite feeling of spring in the air at the allotment. Quite a few people were there working their plots ready for planting and it was warm enough to sit outside in the sunshine.
We had yet more generosity this afternoon, particularly from Bob who gave us some wallflowers for our front and a couple of rhubarb crowns. The flowers grow quite tall so we have put them at each end of the front soil so that we can plant other flowers in between. As part of our seed order we included some flowers, so we will be putting sweet peas, dahlias and sunflowers all about the plot to bring some colour to the place other than the predominant brown!
Thanks to Bob we now have bed that is flourishing with rhubarb. One of the crowns he gave us was one of the biggest he (and us) had ever seen and this was even after he had left some of the roots in his plot! We put it in our soil just as it came and so we will probably get fruit off it this year. This is good news as all of my recent cookery magazines have been full of rhubarb recipes and so the thought of waiting another year to harvest our own was too much to bear! As an interesting aside, when Bob dug up the giant crown I noticed a cluster of wet looking spheres on one of the roots. Now, I guessed that they were eggs of some sort, but I wasn’t sure what they would grow into. I saved one for a photo as a bit of a quiz for you readers:
Drumroll please…….it is a slug egg! Now maybe it is just my ignorance, or perhaps I have never sufficiently pondered the origins of a slug before, but I genuinely did not realise that slugs produced eggs. I am not sure where I thought they came from. But now I know. It just shows that every day at the allotment is a lesson in something or other.
Whilst I was having the nature lesson from Bob, Neil was busy with the staging. He had managed a visit to the allotment yesterday so he was able to complete the staging this afternoon (even with a slightly earlier finish to allow for football watching). And very beautiful it is too. Note the slight gap on the bottom right hand side to allow Tammy continued access to what has become her sunspot.
I got on with planting the shallots which we pictured about a month ago. Advice dictates that they should be planted between mid to late February and late March so we had held off putting them in for a few weeks. But now that March has arrived, along with the sun, the time was right. Plus, a couple had started to sprout or go a bit soft so we didn’t want them to spoil. I had a bit of a dilemma, as our book recommended that they should be planted with their tips at the top of the soil but their label said that half of the bulb should be proud of the soil surface. Our expert Bob had gone home for the day so the decision was left to me. I decided to follow the book’s advice as it didn’t look quite right having so much of the bulb on top of the soil and I was worried that this might leave them vulnerable. Time will tell whether I made the right choice! I labelled the shallots, and everything else we have planted thus far, with a little wooden lolly stick which includes the variety for future reference.
The rest of my afternoon comprised of planting our apple and fig trees which arrived mid week. The apple tree is a Braeburn variety and as well as putting in a sturdy stake, we also followed a handy tip and sunk a piece of spare drainpipe just next to the tree. This has a few holes drilled in the bottom so that we can water down the pipe to get directly to the roots. The fig tree is a Violetta and didn’t really have an allocated spot. We knew it was going into a container of sorts but we didn’t have any to hand other than our wastepaper bins which are too small and the large black bins which looked too rubbishy! So Neil removed the top part of the bin until it looked a bit more like a container. This was not without incident however. In his excitement, Neil managed to cut himself with his fancy (and sharp) new saw. No photos of the resulting injury but there was plenty of blood which dripped all over the place. Not sure if that is a good fertiliser?
This signalled a good time to stop for the day. The next big job will be the cleaning of the inside of the greenhouse, a daunting task that we can put off no longer. Especially as our seed order may arrive in the next week or two. Time is ticking on!
Recent Comments