Wowee! What a result! Last weekend was the annual allotment summer show. We hadn’t been sure what we would have to put in as entries in the produce competition. Some things were passed their best, some things were not quite ready enough! It’s always a bit of a gamble what will look good enough in the day or two before the show. You would think that we would be lovingly tending to each and every entry for weeks, ensuring that it is up to standard but it’s more like ‘hmmmm what looks passable and do we have enough of it?’.
This year we managed to enter our old favourites, garlic and beetroot, along with a cucumber, a single sunflower and a corker of an aubergine in the open category.
It was a good turn out for the show, with lots of items lined up in the judging tent. After the anxious wait for the RHS judge to do the rounds everyone crowds in to check out the results. We managed a respectable second place for our cucumber, beetroot and sunflower. Our poor aubergine didn’t place but the open category is always a tough one. However that was more than made up by our garlic not only being awarded a first place but also winning the best in show! According to the judge he had never seen any as good as ours! What a compliment! So as well as a certificate we have a trophy which is to be engraved! Seeing some of the previous winners on there we certainly feel like we are in esteemed company.
Massive congratulations are due to Bob who won a trophy for best plot over all three sites. This was also decided by the RHS judge who had done a thorough walk round in late July, so he definitely knows his stuff. Well done Bob!
With it being the bank holiday weekend there was plenty of time left for other allotment activities. Neil worked like a trooper as I was off on a cake course. He dug all of the onions up which despite an inauspicious start look amazing. The average size is probably the best we’ve ever had. We’ve left the drying upside down on the bench but will soon have to bring them in for storage.
He also collected a mammoth number of wheelbarrows of manure to cover the area where the onions had been.
The peas had served their time so he pulled them up for composting. Some of the broad beans were starting to flop over and no longer had any harvest worthy beans on them so he pulled up the row which had gone in first. The remainder are still ok for another week or two as they went in later and still have a good amount of pickings on them.
The raspberries have really come on in the last week. We’ve had one or two at a time up till now but this time we could take a full punnet home. The blueberries are still going strong, one plant in particular has flourished since we moved it into a large barrel planter. It’s so bushy with new growth you really have to search to find the hidden fruit.
And to prove I had a worthy excuse for not helping out with all the wheelbarrowing, here is my Gruffalo cake!
We only had a quick visit to the allotment this weekend (well, Monday really due to getting involved in the mud/sun of Glastonbury) but still ended up getting quite a bit done despite the high temperatures (30C in Manchester, who knew?). Bob kindly looked after our greenhouse things whilst we were away (thanks Bob!).
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One of the jobs we’ve been meaning to get done is to set up the automatic watering system in the old greenhouse. The involves hooking up quite a few tubes, then cleaning all the drip ends, before finally attaching the timer. It also meant taking down some of the staging, which was not much fun as it was baking hot in the greenhouse. Once I’d got it all set up it was annoying to discover we have misplaced the timer, so couldn’t really get it all working after all.
Pilla set out planting the celery out, which we have never grown before (partly because neither of us are great fans). This was a tricky task due to odd details on the packet (we thought we had got a self blanching type, the packet disagreed, the Internet was on our side), and involved several trips to Bob’s plot. Much like the leeks, Pilla has gone for some trialling, and planted some deeper than others, we’ll see which turns out best.
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We harvested quite a bit and left with a full trug of raspberries, strawberries, lettuce and beetroot. Elsewhere round the plot we have lots of fruit that looks almost ready – from cherries to plums back to blackberries.
We really feel like we are on top of things on both plots at the moment, which is surprising given our three week absence while on honeymoon. Most of the greenhouse plants have been potted on to their final pots and due to having glazed the new greenhouse some have been moved over to plot 118. We have split all the varieties into both greenhouses, just in case they don’t grow consistently although the new greenhouse seems to be doing its job so far. As a result we seem to have plenty of room for other tasks. Neil has decided to do a little experiment with some rosemary cuttings which he is trying to get rooted. I’m not sure he knows exactly what needs to be done so he has just put them into damp compost! Apparently some rooting/cutting gels have high hormone levels, which is a bit off putting, so we will see what happens without.
We have managed to take a bumper harvest of fruit home already, including about 1.5kg of raspberries, 750g redcurrants, 500g blackcurrants and 500g strawberries, all of which have been delicious. The blackcurrants, our first harvest off the plant we got about a year ago, are incredibly tart when eaten straight from the bush, so need plenty of sugar adding to any recipe they are being used in. I have a plan for the box we have in kitchen, a combination of cordial (move over Ribena!) and some blackcurrant vodka, which will need three months maturing and so will be in good time for Christmas gifts.
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We would have had more strawberries, and gigantic ones at that, had it not been for some local pest problems. The plants we put in during winter have been growing nicely, with large, upright fruit. They started ripening in the last couple of weeks and we had been looking forward to harvesting them once ready. However, eagle eyed Bob noticed that suddenly there looked to be a lot less fruit on the plants. We’ve come to the conclusion that it is either wood pigeons, squirrels or a rat. Whatever is responsible, it is pretty voracious and has left us with few fruit on the plants in the bed. It is a bit disappointing as it has never been an issue in previous years, but I suppose the wildlife now knows after three years on 97 that it provides a consistent supply of treats!
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Another casualty of the wood pigeons has been the kale and the purple sprouting broccoli, again things we have grown for the last two years without any attacks. We only planted them out about a week ago, having reared them to be big and healthy in the greenhouse and they are now almost stripped bare! This necessitated an emergency dash for some canes and netting and Neil spent a good deal of time constructing frames to keep them covered. Hopefully they will be back to normal in a few weeks, although Neil remains pessimistic! I really hope so as kale has certainly been a good crop in the colder months.
More planting out this weekend, a Crown Prince squash, very precious as it was the only one that germinated out of the four I sowed. The broad beans, three varieties, Streamline, Red Knight and Moonlight, have been strung up the munty frame and look quite healthy but we have decided we must be a couple of weeks behind some other plot holders who already have flowers appearing on their beans! The Sugarsnap peas are now twisted round the base of a cane structure, these are the second attempt at these this year, as the first ones that I sowed directly into the ground pre wedding were very poor at germinating. Courgettes, Jemmer, Zucchini and Tundi, have gone out too.
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With the leek planting, I’m trying an experiment of my own. The Gardener’s World website reckons on planting them out once they are pencil thickness into holes that are 15-20cm deep and then watering them in so a little of the soil falls back in the hole. Some others (Bob included) reckon that all you need to do is dig them in with a trowel and put the soil right back over it. So we have two rows, one of each method, and we’ll report back if it makes any difference! We hope to still be in as much control of things in the next couple of weeks, but we have this weekend off in Glastonbury so who knows!
It’s Pilla’s 29th birthday today and we celebrated it in style. Allotment style of course. We’ve had another big break in blogs, for which we are very sorry but it’s been a combination of a) not getting down to the plot that much recently and b) not much going on at the plots. Well, I say not much going on, this is actually my favourite time of year. The weeds are not growing, the place is quiet and you actually feel like you are making progress with the plots, it’s just that there is not that much interesting stuff to report. The day was slightly interrupted today with the annual allotment task of signing up the other plot holders and payment of rents but we managed to get lots done over the weekend none the less.
On Saturday Philippa spent her last few hours as a 28 year old by removing all the old plants from the greenhouse which is now almost completely empty and giving it a good clean out. It only seems like a few weeks ago we could hardly get in there and now there is not a single plant growing! I tidied up the raspberry canes on plot 97 by removing the canes that had fruited this year and tying up the new growth. There are probably about three times as many canes as last year and we were overrun with raspberries so it’s a little bit frightening how many we might get next year.
We’ve been talking for a while about getting a little tea shed on 118, before we could do this we needed a shed base, which I made on Saturday with a layer of sand and 8 of the 2″ by 3″ flags. It started level enough but by the time you have laid a few of those flags you get pretty tired and in the end it’s probably best described as ‘level enough’. It now sits proudly next to the greenhouse base. We did have a plan to put the greenhouse up today but we probably couldn’t have done it in the time we had available, so instead I decided to make a brick path to both the shed and the greenhouse. I think they are best described as rustic! No-one could describe them as level and if you hit the right bricks there are definitely a few wobbles, but it is a good way of using up lots of the bricks we have dug up over the plot. Pilla sorted through the many pots we had of spent compost and grow bags from the greenhouse and spread it all over the asparagus bed.
We’ve harvested our first sprouts since the last blog (of which Pilla ate three, a record!) and today took our first parsnips. What with the beetroot, cabbage and kale we are well into our winter crops already.
…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.
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