Planting onions

It's been a few weeks since we've done much on the allotment, but Nat's parents kindly brought the last of their onion sets with them last weekend for us, so we went up this afternoon to plant them, just before the light faded. We got there at about quarter to 4, and were very pleased to find quite how easily the ground was digging after all the rain over the last few weeks. In half an hour or so (with some help from Angela), we'd dug over the 'carrots, onions and parsnips' area and planted 5 rows of onions (2 varieties of white onions, and one of red in the middle, plus 5 leftover onions from this year that had started re-sprouting). We learnt from this year that, if you you're planning on having rows of carrots between rows of onions, you need make sure you leave enough space to hoe in between, or the carrots get overrun with weeds and stay small. So we spaced the onions out much more than last year.

Reviewing the rest of the allotment, the brassicas are doing reasonably well - we may even get some Christmas sprouts at this rate! The 'spring' onions are also looking very good, although they probably need harvesting really. A few daffodils have started to make an early appearance, and the garlic is looking healthy. As for the rest of the beds, it's not been warm enough for weeds to take over since we last dug them over, so it'll be an easy job to keep them clear over the winter.

Time to plan...

Well 2009 is drawing to a close and winter approaches, so it's time to start planning where things go next year. So here's my first draft of a plan, based on some discussions with Mary-Ann, some thoughts of my own, and the cycle from my book which is basically:
Hungry crops (beans, peas, onions) & salads -> Brassicas -> Root crops

I need to go up and measure properly at some point, so this diagram isn't quite to scale. It's based on drawing round an image from google maps :)

Anyway, going through section by section:

1. Nearest the gate, brassicas and maybe something else as well, covering where the beans, onions, and carrots have been this year. But not digging up the daffodils.

2. Next in, is beans and things, where potatoes have been this year. Maybe aim to have a couple of full rows of beans this year, with more robust infrastructure, but we'll anyway have more beans in the 3 sisters patch. The 3 sisters are sweetcorn, beans and squash: the idea is that the beans grow up the sweetcorn and the squash fills in the gaps on the ground. This is a square area, as it helps the pollenation of the sweetcorn. In the rest of this area we're aiming to go for smaller (and neater!) beds than last year. :)

3. Finally we've got the root crops. The aim here is to grow lots of potatoes, as they're yummy and useful and easy to grow. But we want some carrots, onions and maybe parsnips too. Any thoughts on this?

I think that generally we thought that lettuce needs a tad more attention and is best grown in back gardens, as it has been going to seed somewhat.
So anyway, how does this seem to people?

Milton Produce Show

This year saw the return, after many years' gap, of the Milton Produce Show. Ellie was one of the key people helping bring it all together, and we entered various things from our allotment on the off-chance that some of them might be half decent.

In ascending order of category, then, here's how we got on. First up was the "5 potatoes" category, where you had to enter 5 potatoes of similar size and shape. As a bit of a novelty, we decided to enter some pink fir apple potatoes - they're naturally knobbly, and we found 5 that had knobbles in similar places. And they won the class!

Next up was the squash category, which we felt reasonably confident about, thanks to our packet of "mixed squashes and pumpkins" that we'd planted this year. We checked carefully, and pumpkins are just a type of squash, so we entered our green and yellow stripy round squash and the nicest-looking yellow curly one. The former won 1st place, and the latter 3rd place - not bad at all!

Next again was the "5 runner beans" group. Again, the guidelines suggested you aim for similar sizes, and not too many seeds externally noticeable. I picked about 8 on Saturday, and whittled it down to the most similar-looking 5 to enter. Again once again, we were stunned to discover that we'd won that class too!





After that, our luck started to fade a little - we were 2nd out of 2 in the 'heaviest potato' category, thanks to a real whopper from Stephanie.





And finally, we'd hedged our bets with the pink fir apple potatoes, and entered the knobbliest one in the "ugliest/most misshapen vegetable" category. Clearly the judges knew their potatoes, as we weren't even placed for that. They knew it was supposed to be that shape...

As well as the separate categories, there were also cups for best overall vegetable, etc., and we were very pleased indeed when Simon won the photography cup with a lovely photo of dragonflies in the country park.

The whole day was great fun, if not a terribly serious competition. I think it'll be a lot bigger next year, as there were lots of people coming past and saying "Ooh, I could enter for that class next year." As well as the vegetables, there were also fruit, cake, painting, photography, and handicraft categories. I can't believe I didn't notice the "home-made card" category, for instance! Ah, well, next year...

More clearing

Last weekend, we went up to the allotment again (yeay!). The sweetcorn are definitely coming along nicely - much better than last year. The trick is clearly not to precariously balance a large sheet of wood right next to the young stalks in the high winds...



Similarly, Nat & Jeremy had mowed the orchard the week before, and it was also still looking good. It's pleasing to discover that not everything needs constant attention - every few weeks will keep it under control. it's just leaving it for 2 months in the height of summer that's not so great...

And here's the major (in my eyes) achievement of this weekend - a proper cage around the brassicas, keeping the netting off them. We've also put some stakes in next to the Brussels sprouts, as they were looking a bit windswept. I guess that's what happens when the plant spends most of its formative weeks being supported by weeds!

The one downside to working in the allotment the last couple of weeks, has been that I've been getting bitten by something. My mum also did, so we suspect it was something lurking in the weeds around the brassicas. As they're all gone now, it'll hopefully be safe to venture up there next weekend...

Rediscovering the soil

Having finally moved into our new house, we've been catching up on the allotment over the past few weeks. Thanks mainly to Ellie, I think, it'd been kept in check over the summer, but there were areas where the weeds were close to winning the battle, such as in the brassica area, so it was time to set to and fight back.

The beans, by contrast, have fought off the weeds and become a heaving mass of greenery near the allotment gate. Another year, we'll know not to fiddle around with pieces of string, but just get a load of bamboo canes and let them grow up those.



The squashes have also been doing well. The seeds we planted were a packet of 'mixed pumpkins and squashes', so we weren't terribly sure what to expect. This one appears to be a ... curly yellow squash.





Here's another one, probably a pumpkin this time, with me next to it for scale. I wonder when these should be harvested?



Onto the aforementioned brassicas. We'd covered them in butterfly-proof netting, to stop the cabbage whites eating them to death like last year. The netting was holding up just fine, but most of the vegetation inside wasn't brassicas...

We extracted the edges of the netting from the ground-level weeds, and rolled it back as far as we could, squashes permitting. Now that we had good access to the weeds, they were easy to pull out, and there were a reasonable number of pretty healthy looking brassicas in there, which was encouraging.


Talking of the squashes, here's my mum amongst them. They'd spread all over the place, including up the fence and up and over the brassica netting, so we've had to gently reroute some of them out of the way. I think they've all survived the experience, though.

Lettuce

Weeded the lettuce area yesterday. They've nearly all bolted but I got a couple of decent ones and I think there are a few more to be had, if anyone wants them. Pak choi has all disappeared - at least the slugs got a good meal!

Weeding 11 August

Went up to the allotment today and cleared under the pea wigwam (didn't find any living pea plants, I'm afraid) and the corn area. Lots of lovely blackberries ready to pick from the brambles around the well. Plenty more weeding to do - will try to get there again tomorrow!

Busy busy busy

Just a quick update to say that we haven't abandoned the allotment since the last post, but N and M-A have been rather busy moving house (including renovating it before we move in), so there hasn't been much chance to update the blog.

We've had a nice crop of raspberries, and even a few tayberries, despite this being the first year that the tayberry plant was in the ground. The thornless blackcurrant bush is covered in green berries, so it should be a good crop come the autumn.

A few of the potato plants have wilted, so we've harvested those ones, but nothing else yet. We ought to start harvesting them soon, especially the earlies!

The lettuce was a great success again, like last year, but the first lot has all gone to seed now. The 2nd lot should be just about there shortly. The Pak Choi looks rather nibbled - it's all under netting, so presumably slugs rather than rabbits.

The broad beans got covered in black fly, but we still got a decent crop from them. We don't eat huge amounts of broad beans generally, but they're so easy to grow that it seems a shame not to... we need to find some good recipes, though.

The courgettes are busy producing, and we harvested the first 3 courgettes and a (very long!) marrow this evening. The squashes are covering the ground nicely, and there's even the beginnings of a gourd in there. We don't know which squash plant is which variety, mind you.

The onions have begun to 'flop', but the current thinking is that it's best to leave them until the leaves actually start turning brown, so no harvest there just yet. There are signs of carrots between the rows of onions, but nothing spectacular - probably due to late sowing and not enough watering.

The herb bed hasn't really come to anything, apart from the chives, which seem pretty happy. I've got some tarragon cuttings from Freecycle that I'm trying to get to grow roots, but they don't look terribly happy so far.

The beans are busy climbing up their (carefully tied) string framework. J says it would have been much quicker (in retrospect) to just use canes, rather than the string, but it's there now, and we can re-use it in later years.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to post with some photos in the next few weeks!

Well, well, well...

As I may have mentioned before, there is a well on our allotment. It just about reaches the water table (about 4' down), and had a fairly consistent 8" or so of water until the recent dry spell, when the level dropped right off to just being generally muddy at the bottom. Mark (who shares our allotment) managed to borrow the well-digging thingy last weekend, so he and Jeremy set to trying to deepen the well.

The first idea was to climb into the well and try to dig it down from there. That didn't go so well, as there wasn't enough room to bend over inside the hole. The second idea was to put the ladder in the well and climb down it head-first by hand, to try to dig it out that way.

In the end, I'm not sure what the most successful method was, but they managed to get the well about 18" deeper after a couple of hours or so, so we're back down to water again, which is brilliant. Of course, there is still the main allotment pump for water, but this will save us the walk, and we may even fit our own pump to it at some point in the future.
The potatoes are coming along very nicely, and we've been hilling all the rows that we hadn't previously got round to. I read somewhere that it was a good idea to remove the potato flowers, so that they concentrate on bulking up the tubers, rather than going to seed. So I've been round and taken off all the ones I could find. I'll probably need to go round again next weekend, as the flowers are only just appearing now.

I've now finished planting out the brassicas (no, Mr. Spellcheck, not 'brassily', and we've used a few more of the bike wheels, as you can see here. Some of the ones I planted out last week have wilted, but I'm not surprised, as some of the seedlings were very small. Anyway, it meant I could re-use those spaces in the row for the final few plants, which in turn meant that the netting was nicely wide enough to cover them all.

Here's the general overview now (as seen from the convenient vantagepoint mentioned once before!). Comparing this with the same view a month ago, you can see how much has changed & grown.

Brassicas, carrots, and water

I finally got a chance to plant out the brassicas today! There had been a bit of a calamity earlier in the week, when one of the shelves in the cold frame collapsed, taking the purple sprouting broccoli, globe artichokes and French bean (yes, singular!) with it. I rescued most stuff, but it brought home the need to plant out the broccoli in particular to give the disturbed seedlings the best chance for survival.

So we now have a couple of rows of purple sprouting broccoli, almost a row of cabbage, and just over 2 rows of Brussels sprouts. There's a still a row or so of Brussels seedlings left to plant out, but the sun had nearly set by the time we got that far, so it was time to call it a day.

Having planted the brassicas out, though, we had to get the netting set up, or what was there would be eaten by caterpillars like last year. The netting was only a few cm wider than the bed itself, so not wide enough to stand a foot off the plants and still reach the ground. We turned the netting around by 90 degrees, and it was wide enough that way to cover the area we've planted up today. We've rolled the rest of it up for now - will work out what to do with it all later. It seems a shame to cut it up, but we may need to.

Today also brought the first sightings (at least, by me) of carrots seedlings! I'd just about given up on them, but there are are definitely seedling leaves and even a few of the fluffy leaves in places. We gave them all a good watering, so hopefully they'll continue to flourish.

Finally, the pump has been fixed, which is wonderful news. It'd got to the point where it took about 5 minutes to fill a watering can, but now it takes about 10 seconds - that's better than it's ever been while we've been there. If the summer is as dry as they're predicting, at least the watering won't be as hard work as I feared. Last week, when it was taking ages to pump anything at all, I was being so careful not to spill a drop, as it was all so hard-won. It's given me a new appreciation of quite how precious water is to people who have to walk hours to fetch it both for themselves and to water their fields.

Spring Bank Holiday Weekend

The weather was very good to us over the weekend (apart from the lack of rain!), so we got a lot done up at the allotment. The broad beans now have a supporting structure made from various odds & ends of string, and the peas have a wonderful cane-and-string contraption to support them too.

There are more signs of life in the fruit area - budding apples on the trees and flowers on the blackberry bush. The raspberries canes also have small green proto-raspberries where the flowers were, and ...



... our first strawberry! it's still very small, but we put some straw under it to make sure it doesn't rot - although in this weather, there's not much chance of that!





We got a lot of structural work done on the fruit cage - I'll call this section "Things not try at home". Number 1: standing on the end of an upturned cylinder. Actually surprisingly stable, it turns out.





Number 2 - repeatedly lifting and dropping the pole-bashing thingy to ram the posts in properly. The label on the side says "safety helmets must be worn". We only had 2 helmets, though, and a 3rd person was needed to hold the fencing away from the post while it was being bashed... I didn't stand too close, though!


Number 3: Standing with your arms raised in the full sun for several hours with no suncream - a recipe for sunburn, it turned out. This picture was when we were re-tensioning the wire. We can now walk freely underneath it without garotting ourselves!




And finally for the photos, some wildlife! I found all sorts of things on the apple tree leaves - 2 types of caterpillar and a snail (about 5' off the ground!). The apple trees don't seem to mind, though.




In non-photographic news, I planted out the spring onions and leeks in between the rows of tulips. I've left the cabbage and Brussels seedlings up there, under the lettuce netting - I didn't get the chance to plant them out in the end. Meanwhile, Jeremy sowed two rows of runner beans by the gate, and two rows of climbing French beans slightly further along the bean bed. Ellie had some spare Pak Choi as well, which is now in the salad bed, along with another row of freshly-sown lettuce. The squashes are now out in the left half of the 3rd bed and in a bit of Lin's plot, next to the potatoes.

The 3rd bed had some more digging too (thank you, Ellie!), so we're getting towards the point of being able to plant out the sweetcorn. It's now up at the allotment ready for the planting, but that'll be next weekend now. I hope we'll get some rain before then, but failing that we'll all pop up at some point during the week and do some watering to keep it all happy.

Courgettes and squashes

We were away last weekend, but Jeremy kept the allotment ticking over with some hoeing and watering and stuff. This weekend, I went up a couple of times - more hoeing and hand-weeding around the onions and salad bed (still no definite sign of spinach or rocket or whatever it was I planted in the first row). Meanwhile, Jeremy mowed the orchard to keep it looking good. There's showers forecast for most of this week, so we shouldn't need to go down and do any more watering before next weekend.

I also planted out the 2nd batch of courgettes (2 of them), as the first lot had completely wilted, unsurprisingly - we only planted out the first lot because they were looking unhappy in the kitchen. The 2nd lot look much healthier. I've put 2 courgette seeds directly in the ground as well and watered them in thoroughly, so we'll see if that works.

Back home, the mixed squashes are looking good - the fastest-growing ones will need planting out soon. I had a look at the (globe) artichokes, and decided that they could do with moving into bigger individual pots, so I did the first 8 or so. I need some more pots! I can go over to Notcutts, though, and pick some up there - they've got a pot recycling box by the front door, so people can return old pots and other people can pick them up.

The spring onions and leeks are coming along nicely - they'll need planting out next weekend, I think. The plan then is also to re-cover the fruit cage with netting, as we can definitely see some gooseberries developing, at least.

Missing Link

Somehow, I've missed out any mention of what we managed to get done when Nat's parents were up with us a little while back - I think I got distracted by all the pretty tulip photos! Anyway, Nat and his dad did a load of digging to really sort out the 3rd bed, and I planted out the chives that I'd had on the kitchen window. I also sowed some coriander seed in the herb bed.

When we got back to the house, Nat's mum and I turned all kinds of (washed) plastic food containers into seed trays, and sowed 3 different varieties of coloured dwarf beans. along with loads of sweetcorn in the central cardboard bits of toilet rolls. The idea is that they will act like peat pots, and hold the soil together long enough for the sweetcorn to germinate, but disintegrate once in the ground, which means that we can start them at home but plant them out without disturbing the roots.

Bank Holiday Weekend (2)

We spent 6 hours up at the allotment today (me, Nat & Jeremy), and got loads done. The potatoes that we had already planted had really started to produce leaves, so we set to with earthing them up. We used the ridger to great effect, both for the earthing up and also for planting out the early potatoes that had finally chitted in our shed (Pink Fir Apple in the main potato plot, and Maris Pier in a borrow section of Lin's plot).


Here's the best-looking ridge of the day (for the potatoes being planted). Jeremy & Nat discovered that the trick with the ridger was to think like a horse, and have 2 people on it at once (4 legs good, 2 legs bad, and all that). I did take a photo of them, but have been told that it's "not very flattering"!



Other achievements for the day were to plant out a load more peas - out of the first lot, only about 5 came up, no idea why. I re-used the same rows, as they were already marked out! Next time we go up, we'll need to start constructing supports for them with canes and string, as one of them is about 4" high already. In the first large bed (pictured), we also planted out 4 rows of carrots, 2 of the 'specially for clay soil' variety and 2 of normal maincrop. They are planted in between the onions and garlic, as that apparently wards off carrot fly. Finally in this bed, I removed lots of spent flower heads from the bulbs, to encourage the bulbs to bulk up ready for lifting later in the year.

In the 2nd large bed, there was some more deadheading among the tulips, among which I've planted 10 sunflower seeds that came free from a shop that has recently opened in Cambridge. I also sowed another half-row of spinach and a row of rocket, all in the salad area (with the wheels around). The salad leaves have come up quite well there, but not the rocket or spinach so far. It could be that I've been mistaking it for weeds and hoed it away, of course!

In the 3rd large bed, we planted out the first 4 courgette plants, as they had started to look unhappy on the kitchen windowsill. In case they don't thrive, I've got another 2 just started in the kitchen. I've also sowed a load of the 'mixed pumpkins and squashes' this afternoon, so hopefully they'll be ready to go in at the end of the month.

Tha far end of the 3rd bed is the final bit that we haven't fully dug over yet, but that's for the pumpkins, squashes and sweetcorn, so no huge rush. I've just started some purple sprouting broccoli in the cold frame, re-using the seed tray which had the tarragon seeds (which failed to germinate).

Here's the overview of the whole allotment as it looked today. It's *so* much better than this time last year! Now we just need to keep on top of the hoeing, netting, watering and so on, and we should have quite a decent crop this year!

...and here's the spot Nat took the above photo from! We've used a fair amount of the manure from the heap, but there's still enough left to get a good vantage point.

Finally, we've starting on the fruit cage. We took all the netting off it earlier in the year, so that we could do some structural maintenance. That's going to have to go back on fairly soon, as the fruit start developing. We know we have loads of raspberries in there, as well as strawberries, red currants and backberries. We think there's also a couple of gooseberry bushes and a blackcurrant, but time will tell.

Bank Holiday Weekend

Let's start with some photos of the lovely spring bulbs we've had flowering for the past few weeks. The assorted daffodils/narcissus were true to their name, and had at least 5 different varieties between them, possibly more. This was one that I hadn't come across before - multi-headed flowers!




The tulips were a real assortment as well, although that was more deliberate - we bought 7 or 8 of each variety. This is the showiest one - a real blaze of colour!



These are lovely too - dark and shiny. It's really encouraging to have all these flowers around us when we're up at the allotment. It reassures you that stuff really is growing up there, and it's worth all the effort.





The apple trees are once again out in blossom. This was taken last week, and there are probably twice as many flowers now!




I've mentioned the netting before - our attempt to fight back against whatever might eat our crops before we have the chance to! Well, with a load of old bicycle wheels to act as supports, the salad area is now completely covered.

The beans, on the other hand, are looking rather nibbled, but in an insect-type way, which netting won't help with. We set some beer traps for slugs last week, and found them all pulled up today - deer? Anyway, there were a couple of large beetles that had drowned in the beer - I'm not sure what they were, but they were about 1cm long, so much too big to be pea and bean weevils.

Another productive day today - with all 5 of us up there at the same time (click on the picture for a bigger version). We've finished digging 2 out of the 3 large beds now, and used the ridger for the first time for the first batch of potatoes. It looks like we're going to need more space for potatoes, but we'll work out how to deal with that later - possibly by re-using the same area for two different crops at different times.

We've started planting the potatoes at the middle of the 2nd large bed, and worked our way towards the path side. For the record, the first 2 1/2 rows are Charlottes (salad potatoes, 2nd earlies), and the next 2 1/2 rows are Desirée (maincrop, so supposed be planted out at the end of the month, but they'd started growing shoots already). The 1st earlies are still chitting very slowly in the shed - hopefully they'll get some decent shoots in the next few weeks, and we'll plant them out at the end of the month.

Weekend Progress

Having my parents to stay at the weekend helped move things on at the allotment. My dad helped Nat dig for a couple of hours to remove weeds from the area that the courgette plants will be going into, and my mum helped me plant peas, salad leaves and rocket straight in the ground, followed by globe artichokes, cabbage and brussel sprouts back at the house.

The courgettes on the kitchen windowsill are shooting up rapidly. On Thursday morning, there were 2 small shoots just breaking through th surface of the soil. 24 hours later, we had 3 seedlings with leaves, and the fourth coming through. I've taken daily photos of them to track quite how rapidly they're growing.

The windowsill also has the chives and the basil, both of which are doing nicely too. The chives have done the very cool thing that alium seeds do, where they come through as a doubled-back hoop, then 'unwind' once they're through.

The bulbs are beginning to flower now - here's one of the rows of tulips. The daffodils were almost-but-not-quite out at the weekend, so there are probably a few flowers showing by now.



In other news, we're trying a pre-emptive strike on slugs using a slug trap filled with salty water. In four days last week it got no slugs, so we may switch to using cheap beer instead, once we've had a chance to drop by Tesco. Here's me with the salt cellar! Well, it was the most convenient form of salt I had available...

Netting order

Having reviewed what went wrong last year (most things got eaten by pests before they got established), I've just put in a huge order for protective netting, with finer-mesh netting for the brassicas to keep the butterflies from laying their eggs all over everything. I was very pleased to discover a discount voucher for the netting on http://www.allotment.org.uk. :)

Plan!

Having measured the plots, and pored over the lists of seeds yesterday, we now have a plan! We have 3 large areas to plant in, about 2/3 of which is fully dug and weeded, and most of the rest is roughly dug. We're planning to carry on the digging/weeding in parallel with the planting over the next few months, and have planned what goes where roughly according to when it needs planting out. We've also tried to group together related plants, so that we can get crop rotation working in subsequent years.

First planting

Yesterday, I managed to plant some seeds at last - mostly some flowers for the garden at home, but also some veg. for the allotment.

On the left here we have chives, and the three on the right are courgettes, with the largest pot holding two seeds. If they all grow fine, that'll be plenty for us for the year, but if they don't, there are plenty more seeds in the packet!

New Season

There's been a lot of progress on the allotment over the winter, with various people lending a hand with digging over the beds that we hadn't got to at all last year. We also now have 2 new people on board, each with their own areas to look after, so we can now focus on our 3 large beds and the fruit at the far end.



The onions, garlic, daffodils and tulips that we planted at the end of the last year are starting to come up now, so we have some early signs of life to encourage us. Here's a photo of the daffs.




I also tried out the hoe for the first time this weekend just gone. Last year, we were so busy digging over new areas that we didn't have the chance to tend the areas we'd planted in, and lost a fair few crops to weeds. I managed to hoe all of this area in about half an hour, if that, which bodes well for the rest of the year.



Finally, we've started off the potatoes chitting in the shed at home. We bought 4 bags of potatoes at the end of last year, and when we opened them on Saturday we discovered that they'd all got a bit damp - probably from the frost a few weeks back. Still, most of them dried off just fine by rubbing them in newspaper - this picture is about 2/3 of them; the rest are chitting by balancing on the barbecue! The ones that still looked a bit odd we planted at home, in a spare corner, just in case they do manage to produce anything.