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!
by Neil Wilkinson | Apr 26, 2009 | Allotment
First, a warning – after forgetting the camera last week I think I got a bit carried away today. I could have put about 50 pictures up here today.
We had another two-day allotment weekend. Although we only have a small plot there is always a hundred things to do and not enough time to do half of them. We are seriously considering writing a to-do list and then prioritising our jobs but perhaps this might be taking things a step too far! April is a very very busy allotment month – I very much doubt we can ever go away anywhere in April again!
We only spent an hour or two at the site on Saturday. After doing our now traditional reccy of the site to see what new has grown (this week we have leaf beet, thyme, the horseradish has lots of green on it, some of our green manure has grown and we have our first potato leaves) we set about some serious planting. We planted out quite a bit of coriander and a couple of lines of radishes in our herb bed. Yes, I know radish is not a herb but we have bumped quite a few things around as we figure out how to best use our space. We seem to have a slight issue with our garlic and shallots – after a great start to their lives they are now going a bit yellow on the tips of their leaves. A quick google search suggested this might be a lack of nitrogen, a quick conversation with Bob suggested it could be one of a few things. We’ve tried putting on a few handfuls of some organic fertiliser and plenty of water and we will see what happens.
We got off to a slow start on Sunday, partly down to me watching the marathon, partly because we had to go photocopy some chicken articles from GYO and partly because Pilla is fighting off a cold. We arrived down on the site at about 12 noon, just as the communal chickens were arriving. We are now proud co-parents of 6 hens (we think they are Warrens which are supposed to be great layers and super friendly). One quick meeting later and we have secured contact visits & feedings on weekends. For now they are safely in their coop for a day or two while they get used to their surroundings.
High up on our list of priorities today was planting out the broad beans and sweet peas we have had in the cold frame for the last week. The broad beans were fairly straightforward but the sweet peas need a frame to grow up. After much cutting of cane and tying of string we had built a frame across two beds.
We also planted some dhalia tubers in the front bed and spent a huge amount of time potting and and thinning down our seedlings in the greenhouse. It’s pretty amazing one tiny plant (I’m looking at you parsley and you too sweet marjoram, mizuna you’re not too far behind) can have such a long, deep and intertwined root system. Next year we should learn a lesson from this and plant thinner in seed trays perhaps.
And despite all of that, we still had to leave before we had completed our ‘things to do list’. So it looks like it will be another busy weekend next time.
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:
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!
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