Goodbye shed
We had Friday and Monday off this weekend and along with some helpers we had set about a plan to get rid of our old shed on the new plot. Predictably enough, when you take take time off work to go to the allotment it rains, both Friday and Monday lived up to expectation in that regard.
I started by removing all the glass from the roof, or what was left of it. We used some new fancy boxes from kiddy to store all the broken bits, which came in very handy. We’ve removed so much glass from the plot ourselves I really didn’t fancy adding to it. With the glass out we set out taking down the rotten half. It really only took a few hits with the hammer to remove all the wood, and even break the bigger horizontal pieces in half.
We then cleared out all the junk we had in the shed, finding lots of old tools whilst we were at it, but nothing really of any use. Sadly enough the only place to put this junk it on the land we cleared and put chippings down on recently, but it’s for the greater good and it will get moved on to the tip eventually. After removing the other long side we just had to push the ends slightly and the whole thing came crumbling down. We did have a plan to tidy up and do tip runs as we did the work but it soon became apparent that it was much more fun to knock the thing down and clear up afterwards, which took Pilla, Dad and Nic almost as long as knocking down the thing. I was mostly supervising at this point!
We spent some of Sunday clearing the area in front of the shed and adding some new chippings – it looks really neat now. We also had our first tool casuality at the allotment, I managed to snap my spade in half. All that was left on monday was to do a few tip runs, thanks to Dad again we managed a couple in the rain. There’s still a whopping big pile of wood and a fair bit of bricks and rubble but we are on the way. Thanks to everyone invovled… Dad, demolition expert/logistics, Philippa, site maintenence, Nic, head labourer, and Kiddie storage solutions!
The plot looks lots better, and also looks huge now. We did feel a bit bad for disrupting a fair bit of wildlife, including frogs, toads and hundreds of spiders. The next job is clearing the area of the mountains of bind weed roots and prepping the ground for the greenhouse and shed. Both of us are looking forward to having somewhere to keep dry and make brews in :)!
Much muck
I think the allotment fairies came back to help us this week (no not Pat and Nic who came down to help today, although now you mention it…) because we needed a big pile of manure to add to our freshly cleared space on plot 118 where the soil pile was and yesterday I heard loads of it being delivered from the stables next door. Job number one today then was Pilla and I grabbing lots of it which involved several trips with the wheelbarrow and ingenious use of a big rubble bag and two wheeled trolley. We got plenty enough to cover the ground and with the help of Nic and Pat we dug over all the soil, removed lots more weed roots and glass and worked in the manure.
We then decided to cover the ground with green manure, something I’ve been wanting to do for a while and finally persuaded Philippa into doing it. We planted stripes of four varieties so hopefully it shouldn’t just look like a mass of weeds and will add some much needed organic matter back in to the soil in the spring. It should also help break up some of the soil with the plant roots and I think will make the plot look better through the winter as it avoids a sort of brown desert across the plot. Pilla disagrees with me on the last point so expect lots of posts through the winter on how nice I think it looks!
I finished off the fence at the back, although it does still need a gate. We also cleared up a bit around the back of the shed and covered it up with some tarpaulin to stop the weeds from coming back. On Saturday I went to pick up a few more of the 3×2 flags from Wigan. Those things are incredibly heavy to move and taking them out of the car on your own is an absolute killer. I put a couple of them down to extend the path, I now can’t put any more down as I’ve run into where we are currently storing the greenhouse. We suddenly feel like we have done loads on this plot, so we looked through a couple of the old photo’s and we are pretty pleased at our work:
Back on the old plot we harvested quite a bit from the greenhouse including another 57 chillies! We’ve also discovered another handy thing about people coming and helping us out – we’ve managed to give away quite a lot of our courgette supply!
Chip chip hooray
It seems like it has been a very long time since we’ve updated the blog, which is a shame for lots of reasons, we have a whole lot of news and next year we’ll be wondering what on earth we did in August without any reminders!
The first big job was to collect a new (to us anyway, its actually 20+ years old) wooden greenhouse that we bought on eBay. We had to hire a big van and get ourselves over the Pennines with some help (Tom and my Dad-many many many thanks) we managed to dismantle the structure and bring it back to the plot without damaging it. Whilst there I cheekily asked for the flags underneath the greenhouse and managed to take 10 of those for the path. It’s got to be accepted allotment behaviour to ask for free things, and if you don’t ask you don’t get.
In the meantime the sunflowers which were blooming away so brightly a month ago quickly drooped and we rescued the heads to save the seeds for eating. They are currently drying off in the greenhouse, hopefully away from the squirrels that seem to love finding the seeds and eating them. You can’t mind too much when you see little neat piles of the carefully removed husks around the plot!
The harvesting has continued, we’ve been taking lots of everything really. We have been completely over run with courgettes but have managed to find some interesting ways to eat them. Special mention here goes to the courgette bread Pilla made and the hollowed out massive courgette stuffed with chili. Both delicious!
One of the long standing jobs (I think that should read ‘one of the many long standing jobs’) we’ve needed to do was clear the soil pile left over on plot 118. As I mentioned in the last post this was left over from the path excavations by the previous plot holders and we had since covered it with a membrane to try and kill off some of the weeds. It was a pretty big job over about three weekends but I finally managed to get rid of it all, most of it going to other places on the plot where the soil was a bit low. This has cleared a whole patch of land for us to grow on next year (with the caveat it will still have a lot of weed roots and tons of glass we will have to watch out for). As I was doing this Pilla was busy harvesting the onions and turning the chair into a handy drying rack-good job we don’t often have time to sit down!
The allotment fairies have been kind to us lately as it seems as soon as we need something it’s been magically appearing. Right after finishing the soil pile and so being able to re-use the membrane, the site got a big delivery of wood chippings. This meant we could lay the membrane over the back right corner of the plot and lay the chippings over the top. Pilla got to work in her week off (with help from Bob, thanks Bob!) and managed to move a load of chippings onto the plot ready to be put into position. We managed to move all the chippings into position this week (with help from Nic, thanks Nic!) at the same time re-fitting the fence at the back and weeding across the back path. The whole back of the plot needs a lot of attention as we’ve used it as a bit of a dumping ground whilst it’s not been in use so it’s good to finally making a start clearing it up.
Just as that job was finishing up and my thoughts were turning on how to get more flags for the path and greenhouse base, Bob shouted me over as we’d just got a big delivery. I managed to snaffle 12 3 x 2 flags, along with the few more I’ve got off eBay we easily have enough for the path now. More good timing! Pilla planted some leeks we got fromDenise on the new plot and some lettuces off Bob on the old plot, two more wintry crops that should give us something to eat in the slow months to come.
It was the annual summer show this weekend and with it the allotment veg prizes. Last year we were very happy to win a single first prize but were not as confident this year, so we were very pleased when the tent doors were opened and the prizes announced. We won first prize for our garlic (that’s two years running!) and also for our shallots along with a few third prizes for french beans, beetroot, a jalapeno in the open class and a single flower. We were really pleased for Bob who managed to scoop first, second and third prize for his tomatoes which included the cup for the best in show. Continuing our lucky streak, Pilla won a prize in the raffle which turned out to be a goody box of allotment things. The fairies at work I think 🙂
Another three day weekend…
… it must mean another three days at the allotment and we got tons done again. We had another big job list and managed to get quite a few of them done. Creating a list of jobs to do on the plot is easy, actually getting time to do them when your fitting in weeding, watering and harvesting is another matter.
First up was some time dedicated to planting up our crops for a late autumn harvest and clearing some of the massive soil pile. Whilst Pilla was preparing the beds on 97 for the sweet williams and wallflowers I got to work clearing the massive pile of mud we had been left on 118. The previous occupants had dug up the path one day (it was quite a comical raised grass path that was about 6″ higher than the soil either side) and piled it on one side of the plot. This had then got absolutely covered in horrible weeds and is full of glass and rubble. Which means that not only do we have to dig through it, we have to clear the weeds, glass and assorted hand tools contained within it. I think I’ve got past the half way point and must have cleared around 20 wheelbarrows of mud, putting in around the plot werever the soil looked a bit low (or was of rubbish quality). We thought about using the extra space cleared to plant things but as we had just had some fresh manure delivered from the stables next door we opted to start a manure pile instead. This will eventually rot down a bit and we’ll cover the plot in the winter with it. I can’t see it adding that many nutrients but it should make the soil a better condition and it’s probably been years since anyone put any down on this plot.
Pilla planted some late sowing turnips and some late peas on the new plot. The peas are going at the front where the new potatoes have just come up from. Having not had a crop in for years this side of the plot is on it’s second already this year! We did tons more harvesting too, comedy sized courgettes and cucumbers included. We picked some more new potatoes (probably just plain ‘potatoes’ now) and lots of beans. Having hardly had any beans last year they are one of our big successes this year. The climbing beans in particular have done really well and we are considering scrapping the dwarf variety next year. We haven’t even started on the runner beans of which there are approximately one million. I had a quick weed and managed to put down the last two flags I have on the path, which i’m very proud of as iIt has made a huge difference to how neat the plot looks.
Another exciting job was to plait the garlic we harvested last week. I found this ace link on how to properly tie it together, for begginners like us it was definitely a two person job, but the result is pretty impressive. Our garlic is huge this year, i think every head is as big as the biggest one from last year. We’ve got 27 in total form this solent wight variety, including 6 we have singled out for the show. We’ve also got a batch of smaller garlic, which we harvested this weekend, and it is currently drying in the greenhouse. We used a lot of our own grown things in the Tatton park picnic on Friday night, including lots of fruit in this raspberry jelly. MMMMmm!
It’s harvest time.
Phew! What a nice day Sunday was to have an allotment. We had a list of jobs as long as your arm to get done, partly because the plots were being judged this week and partly because that’s what happens when you have an allotment. Handily enough pretty much all of the jobs were quite fun to do which worked out well as my cousin and family came down to see what we’ve been up to.
First up was harvesting the shallots, the stems of which had flopped over a week or two ago. I like the way shallots grow, they spend ages plumping up, growing big and then all of a sudden they flop over like they have given up. We had a full bed of two varieties to do and we must have got two or three times the amount compared to last year. Me and Denise strung them up and I then hung them out to dry, first on the bird feeder then finally a combination of the greenhouse and shed.
Next up was the garlic, which Kieran and Aidan helped out with. The garlic had also completely flopped over during the week which is a pretty good sign it’s ready to be picked. Only one type, the Solent Wight, was ready and it looks great. We spaced them out a bit more than last year and the soil is probably in better condition, but even so we weren’t expecting such a big crop. I think every single bulb is bigger and rounder than last year, I think we have 26 bulbs in total.
We then set about some furtling around in the carrot bed. I think we managed one measley carrot last year and the bed was looking very healthy so we dug up a few ….. and….. they look amazing! We were like proud parents! Pilla even ran off down the plot to show Bob she was so proud! The boys then happily wandered around sharing a carrot whilst pulling up some of the huge turnips. They have gone epic in scale. I’ve never seen anything like them, I’ll try and take a picture next week. Pilla got on with planting some more lettuce varieties and we tidied up some of the old lettuces which has gone to seed. Pilla has been really good at successional sowing this year – we are on our third lettuce crop already!
Out with the Old and in with the New
Don’t panic, it’s not Neil that is getting thrown out! It’s the crops that have passed their best!
It is a strange time of year as we are harvesting lots but there are some crops that are already starting to look a bit tired. The unpredictable weather has not helped either, as the wet and warm conditions have meant that a few of the lettuces, the broccoli raab and the pak choi have gone to seed. Part of me felt bad that they had to be pulled up but they are no good once they reach that stage as the leaves taste bitter. In any event they make the way for other exciting things!
Something that we wanted to improve on from last year was making better use of our space and extending our growing season. One way we have done that is to keep on top of those crops that need to be successionally sown, such as lettuces, spring onions and various herbs. Another way to achieve this goal was to do some clever seed shopping. About 6 weeks ago we placed a further seed order specifically for those crops that can be sown later in the season. Once I had cleared the seeded crops this weekend I set about planting some of the new varieties which included beetroot (boston), carrot (nanco), mustard (red zest) and bunching onions (shimonita). Hopefully this will mean that we will be harvesting tasty crops during the September-December period which was pretty lean last year. We have some more late sowing seeds that we will sow over the coming weeks as more of our current crops reach the end of their useful life.
Neil was busy once again with the path on the new plot, which is growing as fast as the vegetables! We are almost out of flags now though so we are on the scrounge from anyone who has any spare. He also built a little raised bed that we have been talking about building for ages. We finally got round to visiting the reclaimed timber yard this weekend and so Neil dug up the top trek layer to give some extra depth for this new bed. In true recycling style he then used some of this top trek to level out the path flags and the rest to fill in some holes in the car park! To fill the new bed he sorted through a few wheelbarrows worth of soil from the ‘mud mound’ on the new plot, so it really looks like a sizeable chunk has gone already.
Exciting news to end with! Firstly, we ate our first homegrown cauliflowers this week and they were tasty! We tried to grow them last year and after weeks of anticipation watching their crowns form they all blew and went to seed before they were ready to be picked. This year we tried them on the new plot with much more success. We put this down to the slightly lower soil temperatures compared to the raised beds, but who knows! A little tip to share, once the heads are almost fully formed use some padded pegs to clip the outer leaves over the crown to protect it from the sun and hopefully prevent the head blowing.
And finally…we have a new greenhouse! After a few failed auctions we were finally successful in winning a greenhouse on eBay. It is a 10ft x 8ft wooden framed one with a louvre window which will replace the wooden ramshackle shed on the new plot. It is to be collected from its current owner in the next few weeks so wish us luck for the deconstruction/journey/reconstruction!
Mmmmm
Had a lovely allotment lunch today, a salad only containing things we grew on the plot. I went last night and got salad leaves, beetroot and broad beans and added some new potatoes, an egg and our cucumber. With a homemade honey and mustard dressing it was flipping lovely!
Sorry…
…As our regular reader(s?) will know it’s been a while since the last update on here, very nearly a month in fact. We’ve not been managing to get down to the plot as much as we would like this summer for a variety of reasons, the last two weekends before this one felt like we had hardly done anything. We tried to change that this weekend and we have got a few days booked off at the end of the week to hit the plot again (and make them both look nicer for the allotment competition judge who will be coming round soon!)
Since the last update we have decided to try and put a better path down 118, it currently has just a black membrane down and frankly looks a bit rubbish. It doesn’t help we’ve been piling weeds on there to dry out in the sun so it looked a mess and really needed sorting. To that end I have been scavaging a few flags (17 at the last count) which have been an absolute pain to move around, I had no idea how heavy they were. I set to work laying a few of those this weekend whilst Pilla bravely tackled weeding the whole of 118. It’s a huge plot but Pilla is very efficient with the hoe and managed to get the lot done. We both weeded the front after that and the plot looks way better for it.
We now have a nice new sign on the front of the plot from the Society – the dreaded ‘Hosepipe Ban’ sign. Our plots are pretty close to taps and we don’t really water that much outside of the greenhouse so hopefully it shouldn’t effect us too much. We did feel sorry for the people who have to walk down past a few plots to get to a tap. In the heat that is not a fun job! We really have noticed the lack of rain, the ground is very dry, but it’s doesn’t look like our plants are suffering too much at the moment.
We spent the few hours we had on Sunday on the plot sorting the greenhouse. It was really packed with chilli, sweet pepper and aubergine plants to the extent you couldn’t really get in there. This is not great for a variety of reasons not least that the fruits in there need light to ripen. This was a much bigger job than we thought, we pulled out all the Jalapeno, Cayenne, Padron, Sweet, Marconi, Chili, Twilight, Black Pearl and Habanero Peppers – we must have 4 or 5 of each. Most of them needed staking and some we decided to give away, but once they got a good watering they got placed back in the greenhouse with a lot more room and hopefully a lot more light.
We have been taking loads of produce off the plot. We must have had about 2 kilo’s of strawberries so far, including this rather interesting looking fella. I’m not sure if we should have censored it or not! Alongside the mountains of strawberries have been getting an almost equal amount of raspberries. Seeing how many we got this year, I’m not sure we needed to buy the second variety we got earlier in the year, next year we’ll be swamped! We’ve also had (in no order) turnips, cauliflowers, carrots, courgettes and cucumbers (you really forget how many of these you get. It’s madne, ss), potatoes, red currants, blackberries and more lettuce than we could possibly eat. Ace.
To say sorry again I’ve made a video on what Plot 97 has done this year. You lucky things.
Summer arrives!
You know it’s summer when you have your first strawberries, when you can can a BBQ without it raining and when the England football team are playing badly – all three of which happened on Saturday.
Saturday afternoon at the allotment was great, we celebrated the nice weather with our first allotment bbq – featuring our own produce and some homemade burgers from home – delicious! Before we could tuck into that we did have some work to do. Pilla planted out the courgettes across both plots and weeded a fair bit of plot 118.
I spent a while in the greenhouse attaching the tomatoes to their supports, it doesn’t seem that long ago we planted them on but a couple had go so big they had toppled over a bit. On Sunday we had another move about in the greenhouse, taking down the staging at the side of the greenhouse so we could spread the peppers and tomatoes out and attached the tomato supports to the greenhouse.
After the great weather on Saturday, the forecast was a bit more dodgy today. We managed to get a fair bit done though, Pilla had a good weed on the side of plot 97 and I planted out our cabbages over on plot 118. We had a good weed around there too, covering the onion bed and generally all over as the soil had quite a lot of little weed seedlings growing. The good news was the that rain overnight seemed to have given the beetroots some life, we were complaining two weeks ago they hadn’t germinated well, we planted some more (which have all now germinated too) and lo and behold we turn up today and there are tons of little seedlings. We’ll probably have hundreds of beetroots now! The lettuces are looking great, we’ve been taking loads off them lately (they have provided three lunches and lots of side salads with tea this week) and they are still massive.
One salad that didn’t grow well was the red spinach, it seemed to go straight from seedling to seed head, it was the fastest bolting thing we’ve ever grown. We dug it up today and replanted, I’ve read something on the Internet (which I don’t really believe, but anyway) that plants are more likely to go to seed as the days are getting longer, has the days shorted the risk recedes. We’ll see how that goes.
Bumper picture special
Due to the Manchester 10km and Edinburgh marathon over the last two weekends we haven’t been spending a lot of time on the plots and have had even less time to update the blog. We’ve made up for the former by having a four day weekend of allotmenting and I’ve taken a lot of pictures to get a good update done.
Two weeks ago we moved the munty frame from 97 to 118 – there is a lot more room there and it held up very well in the move. We’ve planted out about twice as many runner beans as we did last year, with a new variety that’s a cross between a runner and a french bean and as such is less stringy. We got these out just after the last frost which caught a few people out (including killing the top leaves of our potatoes), and the beans seem to be doing pretty well, hopefully there won’t be another frost. This weekend we quickly hardened off the sweetcorn for a few nights and planted them out in front of the runner beans.
After the AGM on Sunday we bought four Brussel sprout seedlings as out of a whole tray of our own seeds only three germinates and we have only two viable plants. Considering just one of us eats sprouts I think two plants would be more than enough but it just didn’t feel like enough. Still, at 30p a seedling we hardly broke the bank! Next up was planting out some sugar snap peas, dwarf french beans, climbing french beans and peas. To do this we had to create something for them all to climb up – the dwarf french beans and peas need support up to about waist high, the climbing beans and sugar snaps need something considerably higher. I designed a totally unique structure (absolutley nothing like the bean structure on Bob’s plot, it’s not even close*) and put it right next to the nets I made for the sprouts (the netting is also nothing like the net structure just next to it on Bob’s plot. Totally different*) and Pilla planted out the seedlings and sowed a few extra peas in the holes for good measure. We then did a fair bit of weeding over the plot as the warm and wet weather over the last week seemed to have really brought out the weeds, they are growing quicker than everything else! We also planted a line of sunflowers in front of the beans and gave the onions and broad beans a liquid feed – we have some concerns about how fertile the soil is on this bit of the plot and neither the onions or broad beans look particularly healthy.
We spent a lot of time potting on plants in the greenhouse throughout the weekend as we had lots of plants busting to move into bigger pots. We potted on all of our tomatoes into their final pots, along with the padron and black pearl chilli’s, marconi and new ace peppers and the aubergines (moneymaker). I took down some of the staging to make room for the plants in their bigger pots – I took the staging down but left the ‘deck’ and legs in two large pieces which I then attached the side of the greenhouse. This keeps them out of the way and should mean it’s really quick to put up the staging again in the spring.
We did a general weed on plot 97, although there really wasn’t that many to take out. Pilla did some successional sowing of lettuces in a free bed, something that we weren’t very good at last year and vowed to improve upon this time around. On Sunday we thinned enough of the many lettuces we have to make a tasty salad for tea. Pilla also sowed another batch of parsnips and a few beetroot as the germination rate on the new plot has been really disappointing which we think might be a sign that the soil fertility is in need of some help . We had tons of beetroot last year (some of which won a prize at the summer show) so only having a few will be a real shame.
Elsewhere on plot 97 things are looking pretty good – we have lots of blackberry flowers across the whole length of the bush, it’s quite amazing that this was a tiny little plant this time last year. We have loads of little strawberries growing and in the same bed the raspberry canes are covered in fruits that are not quite ripe, flowers which results in frequent visits from many bees. The scabiosa plant has survived the winter and now has it’s first very pretty flower. Happily we only have a few days of work this week before we can get back to the plot!
* Ok, I ‘borrowed’ the design from Bob!
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