Tammy update

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.

Summer days

Another glorious summers day in Manchester arrived today.  Oh no, hang on, sarcasm is quite difficult to do in a blog!  It’s pretty much been non-stop rain today so we didn’t get much done.  Handily enough though we don’t really have a lot to do anyway.  Allotmenting is a pretty curious beast – just at the point you think it’s going to be all hands on deck for the summer, well that’s the exact point when you don’t have to do very much.  We had a bit of weeding to do and the plants in the greenhouse needed a good watering and that was about it really.   The greenhouse plants seem to be doing really well – we had our first tomato and sweet pepper on Saturday.

   

We had another good harvest – plenty of runner beans, potatoes, salad leaves, cucumbers (we are currently a bit overrun with them), a few courgettes, thyme, mint and chives.  The courgettes are proving to be curious things.  We have four plants and the two yellow courgette plants are going great guns producing quite a few fruits (I had a quick discussion with Pilla, and we *think* it’s a fruit) the green courgettes are proving a little more stubborn.  This is despite the fact that they have lived side by side since the first leaves appeared.  Why the difference?  Who knows!

 

Some of our garlic has flopped over so we took the opportunity to dig one up see how it was doing – and it’s actually a pretty good size.  We’ve left it drying out in the greenhouse, I’ll try and take a picture next week.  Pilla had some Treasurer duties to attend to by signing up a new plot holder and that was pretty much it – we were home for lunch.  In the depths of winter we would have loved a few allotment days like that!

Chicken or the egg?

The chickens we jointly look after have got their laying groove on – we found three eggs on Saturday and another two today.  We had a further six waiting for us in the allotment fridge, as you can see they are a massive assortment of sizes and shapes but all the better for that I think.  If we wanted perfect looking food I suppose we could just go to the supermarket – but that would mean missing the excitement of rooting around nest boxes!

  

Our harvest from the allotment is now notching up a gear – this week we’ve taken home a lot of new potatoes, cucumbers, mint, raspberries, broad beans, sugar snap peas and a few different lettuces.  Most of this produce has been eaten straightaway – only some of the broad beans have had to go in the freezer.  The lettuce has been really successful and was delicious with tonight’s dinner.

 

We only spent a few hours at the plot late this afternoon – after the morning run for Pilla’s half-marathon training we had a nap – it’s taken us a week, and we still haven’t recovered from Glastonbury!  Luckily the plot is taking care of itself a lot these days so we just had a bit of allotment ‘admin’ to do – weeding, watering, a tiny bit of planting out and adding support to some of the plants.  I tied up the sweet peas at the front of the plot whilst Pilla took the weeds out of all the beds.  The advantage that we got when we took on this plot was the lack of weeds – it took around an hour but Pilla managed to weed the whole plot.

 

I also added a bit of support to the tomatoes – some of which are now up to the roof of the greenhouse.  After some watering and feeding that was pretty much us done.  I think we might have spent longer harvesting our crops and taking pictures than we did doing ‘proper’ jobs – that’s how allotment life should be I think!

  

Allotment friends

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.

From Plot to Plate

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!