by Philippa | Apr 20, 2014 | Allotment
The long weekend started off uncharacteristically sunny and Neil managed a full afternoon down at the plots on Friday. He had a plan to do some DIY and build a new gate for the back of plot 118, as our ‘temporary’ one has been in use for about two years! He finished the gate in record time but didn’t quite manage a full coat of woodstain as it takes longer than you think to do a good job of it.
We both returned on Saturday. Lots of signs of Spring, blossom open on all the fruit trees which looks beautiful. Also, the tulips at the front have opened and added some colour. The daffodils that we unceremoniously shoved in far too late after we found them starting to sprout in the shed have even made an attempt at flowering! Very full blooms but only about 3 inches tall!
However, it is that time of year where it seems all you need do is turn your back for a moment and the weeds are abound. It gives you itchy fingers to just get blitzing everywhere and so for the first hour or so that is what we did. I weeded all of plot 97 and down the outside of the fence by the path as there were a lot of flowering dandelions that will soon be sending their seed out so heavily it looks like it is snowing! Neil cleared all along the back of plot 118 and I then cleared in front of the greenhouse where the weeds were coming through the membrane. After a bit of hard work it looked much neater all round.
Neil completed painting the new gate which I am very impressed with! He then started to dig over the front left side of the plot ready for planting the chitted potatoes sometime later over the weekend. As soon as you start digging, the robin who hangs around our side of the site pays a visit. He is so tame it’s almost like having a pet, he will come right up to you while you work and you sometimes catch him with a worm in his mouth! It’s easy pickings when you’re turning up hundreds of them at a time!
While Neil was digging I did some planting as I had a bit of a panic when I realised it seemed like we were a bit behind with sowing. I’m sure it’s all in your head at this time of year, all it takes is a couple of sunny days and it suddenly feels like you are running out of time to get things done! So I planted cauliflower (snowball), cabbage (candissa), broad beans (masterpiece green longpod), Brussel sprouts (hastings and Evesham special) and Spring onions (white Lisbon and lillia). So we felt quite smug on leaving on Saturday with how much we had achieved and there looked to be quite a difference between when we arrived and when we left!
by Philippa | Aug 11, 2013 | Allotment
I popped down for a few hours on Saturday while Neil was off playing cricket having been inspired by the Ashes. Apart from watering the greenhouses almost all of my time was spent harvesting goodies, which I can hardly complain about!
We got another massive punnet of blackcurrants. I just wish there was a quicker way of picking and getting rid of stems from them, it’s such slow going (and back breaking too!) but worth the bounty at the end of it.
I also took away a bulging carrier bag of broad beans, both trugs already full. I had thought it might be the last lot of broad beans but in fact there are still a lot on the second sowing of plants so we’ll have a few more bags to fill I bet! I came face to face with a large hairy caterpillar whilst picking the beans. Not sure what he will turn into but I bet it will be impressive given how fancy he looks now.
The plum tree has been stuffed with fruit for weeks now and this is the first time they have looked almost ripe. I gave a few a squeeze and found some almost fully ripe so I brought a handful home to ripen up in the fruit bowl. I will need lots of bags or buckets when the rest are ripe. And some tasty plum recipes!
As well as the first plums, I also brought home our first climbing French beans. Without doubt they are the best climbing beans we have ever grown. They are unblemished, a good size, straight. This is quite a surprise as we haven’t done anything different this year and when we planted them out they looked absolutely terrible for weeks and at one point looked like they had died! It was worth the wait and I’m looking forward to eating them and the rest we harvest.
I’m hoping that the same can be said for some of our brassicas as since last week something has given them a good going over. They are securely netted so it’s nothing larger than the small holes in that. Having spoken to Bob his look a bit worse for wear too and he thinks it might be caterpillars. Hopefully in a few weeks the caterpillars will have moved on and the plants will still have plenty of growing time, otherwise I don’t think a few of them will recover!
I took another trug full of courgettes home as they’ve really taken off. So while Neil had his cricket tea I made use of a couple of them cooking my own tea of courgette rarebit. A simple but tasty dish of gently fried courgettes, spring onions and garlic topped with a mixture of beaten egg, mustard and grated cheese with a sprinkling of breadcrumbs. A quick ten minutes in the oven and a lovely homegrown meal to enjoy!
by Philippa | May 27, 2013 | Allotment
I managed a cheeky few hours on Wednesday this week. But something was telling me that maybe this wasn’t a good idea as it became a very weird visit! Firstly, there was a headless (needless to say dead) bird on one of the beds. I had to be brave and get rid of it. No sign of the head yet-I’m a bit dreading it turning up somewhere!
Second weirdness was the discovery of a giant buried egg! I was planting some carrots (early market, flyaway and autumn king) and beetroot (boltardy, golden, forono and barbabietola di chioggia) and gave the beds a good raking first. I uncovered what at first appeared to be a large potato, although there was no associated greenery. On closer inspection it was a large egg, entirely unbroken and buried quite deep. I left it on the surface as I carried on planting, while a magpie eyed up the egg and eventually pecked into it-what a stench! So that got a flinging too! Later research indicated it was probably a goose egg buried by a fox for snacking on later.
I retreated to the greenhouse so I could catch up on some seed planting. I planted all of our courgettes (yellow jemmer, zucchini and floridor) and our squash (butternut, metro pmr, Turks turban, crown prince, bon bon, autumn crown, marina di chioggia). I also started a few larger pots of herbs, parsley, thyme, coriander and green and purple basil. A few last pots of melon (watermelon charleston grey and Blenheim orange) and spring onions (white lisbon and red) and then the final fright was a huge hairy spider in the greenhouse! A sure sign it was time to pack up and go!
by Philippa | Jul 21, 2010 | Allotment
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!
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!
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