Milton Allotment

Off we go again

2011-05-02T16:51:00.005+01:00

Having pretty much abandoned the allotment over the winter, we've been back in the last few weeks, and it's been pleasingly quick to get it all back in shape. Nat and Jeremy spent a while getting the surface weeds off the soil and then they and Nat's dad set to with the rotavator and cleared the 2nd and 3rd beds very nicely. All in all, it took about three visits to get just about two fully clear beds.

The next step is, of course, to fill those beds with plants! Here's Nat and Jeremy planting out the potatoes last week. As far as we can remember, we've got Majestic, Red Duke of York and Charlotte this year. We got fewer seed potatoes than last year, as they're hard work to plant out and keep earthing up. The Majestic ones are yet to be planted; they're still chitting in the kitchen.

We've also planted (in the foreground) three rows of parsnips, 2 1/2 rows of onion sets and (behind) two short rows of mangetout.

In May, I think the plan is to direct sow sweetcorn, more mangetout and some climbing French beans (but I haven't got my notes on me).

Finally, we have two courgettes and four squashes sprouting nicely on the windowsill in the kitchen to planting out later in the year. Let's hope some of it pays off!

Mixed squashes and pumpkins

2010-08-17T12:28:00.011+01:00

I said last time how well the courgettes are doing (and they still are!). Being closely related to courgettes, the squashes are also very happy this year. Last year, we bought a "packet of mixed squashes and pumpkins", and got two varieties out of it - the stripy Padana pumpkin and the curly Tromba of Albenga squash.

This year, we planted some more from the mixed packet, and some seeds that we harvested from the (prize-winning!) pumpkin from last year. As a result, we've got at least four varieties on the go, and plenty more of each. First up, we appear to have another Padana pumpkin - there are at least three like this, but none have the orange stripes of last year, so they may be from the seeds we harvested, as they apparently cross-breed very readily.

Next up, it's definitely a "Custard White" squash. I was hoping for some of these last year, so this is a very welcome sight. I'll try to get a better photo at some point, but they're quite deep into the squash patch.

I'm really not sure what this one is: it's very round, with smooth skin. My best guess is that it's a classic orange "Quintale" pumpkin.

And finally, we have some yellow curly ones again. This one looks more like the photo on the packet than the ones we got last year, with the beginnings of stripes visible.

So what haven't we seen yet from the mixed packet?

I'll keep an eye out to see if any of these turn up over the next few weeks. The knobbly ones look interesting, but are probably hard to peel!

Courgette counting

2010-07-22T17:14:00.003+01:00

Previous years have been a bit disappointing as far as courgettes go, so this year I sowed a who tray of courgettes, to make sure that at least some would come up. We ended up planting out 17 seedlings, which gave me a slight feeling of trepidation: what if they all came good? So here they are a couple of weeks ago. As you can see, they all very happy plants...

So, inevitably, having overcatered on the plant side, we now have a *lot* of courgettes. By my counting, we've harvested at least 25 so far in 2 weeks, and that may be an underestimate!

The Foodshare bin has been benefitting from this, naturally, and we've given some away to friends too (aka insisted they take some!).

The beans are just starting to produce now: I picked a handful today. As I type, there's the first proper rain we've had for weeks, so that should perk everything up too.

More planting

2010-07-12T13:05:00.002+01:00

I had another good session at the allotment yesterday, despite the heat. I took up the rest of the trays from the greenhouse that needed planting out, namely the 2nd half of the Chinese cabbage, the purple sprouting broccoli, the Brussels sprouts, the cabbage and a few extra French beans.

I put everything except the beans in the brassica area - not quite everything fit inside the cage, so the last few Chinese cabbage were planted outside. We'll see if they survive on their own! The first lot of Chinese cabbage and pak choi look very happy, so hopefully we'll have a better year for the rest of them too this time.

The French beans I took up from home had got to the point of having small bean pods already, which made me look closer at the ones on the allotment that didn't. Something's definitely been nibbling them round the edges. I remembered that we had some spare netting that we bought last year, so that's now over about a third of the beans. If it's rabbits, I don't think it'll keep them off, but if it's birds, it should do the trick.

The courgettes are ramping up now - I harvested 7 yesterday, with plenty more on the way by the looks of it. We may be overrun with courgettes this year - I hope David really likes the taste!

The raspberries are definitely not happy this year. There are far fewer canes than previous years, and the raspberries are mostly very small and not very juicy. The former problem is, I think, because we haven't been managing to keep on top of the weeds, so Mark's ideas about digging it all up and replanting should go a long way towards sorting that out. The latter problem is probably just due to the dry weather we've been having. There's rain forecast for this week, though, so we may yet get a few juicier berries.

The hottest day of the year

2010-06-27T19:04:00.009+01:00

Sunday was the hottest day of the year so far, and Jeremy was happy to entertain David for a while whilst Nat did some DIY, and I managed to escape up to the allotment for a few hours - lovely weather for it! I got loads done, which was sorely needed. First, I finished weeding the carrots and parsnips that I'd done roughly the other week. On the right here are 'before' and 'after' shots.

In the foreground, you can see the parsnips - about half a dozen or so have come through - not bad for our first year, as we hear that they're notoriously difficult to get to germinate. I had to look up what parsnip leaves look like, so that I didn't weed them by mistake - these all have the same leaves, and are in a neat row, so I'm pretty confident they really are parsnips.

I then went back to the beans and gave them a good watering, as it's been so hot recently. They seemed pretty happy even before I watered them, so hopefully they're developing good root systems.

Working back again towards the gate, the squashes and courgettes look very happy without any more watering, so I just hoed round them all to keep the soil clear.

The final job for the afternoon was to start on the brassicas at last. I took with me half of the Chinese Cabbage and half of the Pak Choi, and planted them in the brassica area. I discovered that an ants nest had developed on the greenhouse staging, in and around some of the seedling trays. Some of the ant colony ended up being relocated the the allotment - the rest are still in situ, but I've shuffled things around so that the ants eggs are now all under empty trays, not in the ones with seedlings in (hopefully!).

Having planted out the seedlings, it was time to reconstruct the brassica cage to stop things eating them. I saw a rabbit in our allotment while I was up there - I didn't see exactly where it went, though. Hmm. We also want to keep the cabbage white butterflies off, or the caterpillars will decimate the crop again. The cage is currently functional, but one corner needs a couple of screws to keep the wood in place properly, not just balanced as it is now.

What next? Well, at the far end of the allotment is, of course, the fruit cage. Mark told me at the weekend that he'd planted strawberries there again this year, and they're looking much happier than the ones we put in last year. The rest of the fruit cage is pretty overgrown with (mostly) grass, though, so there's a fun job for some point soon. Some of the raspberries are ripe already, and it's be a shame to just let them rot because we can't reach them. After this year, Mark reckons that we should dig up the whole raspberry patch and re-plant the canes, as they've spread over the years and definitely aren't contained within the lovely neat row of wires any more! We could also dig up the grass and other weeds while we're at it, making it more maintainable in general.

Beans and bees

2010-06-21T18:50:00.009+01:00

Since the last update, we've planted out all the runner beans and most of the French beans. More sensibly than last year, used canes to support them, rather than string. This photo was taken about half-way through planting out - we now have 2 1/2 rows of beans.

The rest of that bed is squashes and sweetcorn. We were going to try to "three sisters" planting method (squash, beans and sweetcorn), but apparently sweetcorn doesn't grow high enough quickly enough in this country to support the beans, so we're just on "two sisters" instead.

We're got a few carrots appearing now in the next bed over. The weeds had set in remarkably quickly, so I cleared them out again to give the carrots a chance.

After a tip-off from a fellow allotment-holder, I investigated the garlic (it'd started to go a bit yellow in places), but found out that it was still too early. Still, the mini-bulb provided a nice meal for 2 last night.

Some newcomers to our allotment are bees! Mark has decided to take up bee-keeping, and the hive is in our orchard area, so we've hoping for lots of fertilisation from them, and hopefully plenty of honey, too. Barny may even have a rival for the produce show this year, unlike last year!

Finally, here's our well working nicely. We're using an old watering can as the bucket. First we drop it in on its side, so it fills up through the usual hole on top, then right it and pull it up with some long string that we keep attached to it (see left of photo). The can has quite a few leaks in, so could probably do with replacing, but it does the job of getting the water up a couple of metres, which is the main thing.

The well has been very nice to have this year, rather than trekking down to the pump. Unfortunately, yesterday I discovered that some local wildlife had somehow got past the well cover and ended up at the bottom of the well, so I switched back to the pump. I'm not sure how we're going to get them out...

P.S. I've been playing with the look of the blog - new background!

Spot the difference!

2010-05-22T20:23:00.002+01:00

We had lovely weather today, so spent a lot of the day outside. Nat & Jeremy went up to the allotment for a while; Jeremy planted out loads of the beans (more on that later) and Nat mowed everything he could think of, particularly the paths and round the orchard.

Meanwhile, I sowed the next lot of seeds - mostly brassicas (purple sprouting broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, pak choi and Chinese cabbage (yes, I know the last two should be the same thing, but they look different on the packets, so we'll see what happens...)) and then some "cutting celery" and goji berries (just because I had the packets). See if you can see what's changed in the greenhouse after all that!

So, about those beans... after much to-ing and fro-ing, we finally worked out that what I thought were "Purple Queen" French beans were, in fact, runner beans. I was thrown by the fact that the beans themselves were purple, as I'd remembered the "Purple Queen" ones to be. Well, you live and learn... still, it meant that we had runner beans ready to go!

Seedlings

2010-05-10T20:06:00.003+01:00

All the trays in the greenhouse are now showing signs of life. With frosts predicted overnight for the next few days, however, it's still not time to plant them all out.

Here, clockwise from the left, we have celeriac, salad leaves, French beans and squash at the back, then sweetcorn, more beans, tomatoes, chives and some other herb, possibly oregano. And more sweetcorn in the middle at the very front. To the right of what you can see here is a propagator with basil and another herb, possibly coriander. Finally, on the other side of the greenhouse are yet more sweetcorn, beans and squashes.

Sprouts

2010-04-23T13:37:00.002+01:00

... not the Brussels kind, but there are definitely some sprouts in the greenhouse from the 'Purple Queen' dwarf French beans, the lettuce/salad leaves and from the sunflowers (I forgot to mention them last time - we're finishing off a packet from last year; I also forgot to mention the chives.). Now, providing I keep remembering to water everything, I'm sure it won't be long before we see even more signs of life!

Digging and sowing

2010-04-16T20:29:00.007+01:00

Nat's parents are up for a couple of days, which means that there have been enough spare hands to look after David and also do some allotmenting. Nat's dad has dug over lots more of the ground, particularly the first bed, where the brassicas are going.

He also filled up loads of seed trays and cellular pots with compost, ready for planting seeds in. We then went from this ...

... to this, this afternoon. The trays are now all back in the greenhouse, which has been wonderfully tidied, thanks to Nat's mum. There's just about enough space for all the trays on the greenhouse staging.

So, planted/sown today were: French beans, dwarf French beans, courgettes, squashes, basil, coriander, oregano, celeriac, lettuce, tomatos and sweetcorn (in toilet roll inners).

There's a separate pile of seeds to be planted directly at the allotment: rocket, spinach, peas, carrots (2 varieties) and parsnips.

And finally, the seeds to be planted in seed trays next month are: broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, more tomatos, chinese cabbage, pak choi, celery and goji berries.

Spring flowers

2010-03-28T19:36:00.003+01:00

Spring is finally here, and the allotment has responded with the bulbs starting to come into bloom at last after the long winter. On the left above are the first row of tulips to come out, and the hyacinths. On the right, you can see the rows of daffodils just coming out as well. Another week or so and it'll really look wonderful, especially when the small multi-headed daffodils are out.

Nat and Jeremy have been hard at work for the last few weekends digging over the various vegetable beds ready for this year's crops. It's really looking good now - here's the bed that the potatoes are going into, along with the onions , carrots and parsnips. As photos go, it's not very exciting, but the soil is looking lovely and clear, which is the main point. :)

Now, unfortunately, there are rumours afoot that the parish council may have some plans that will affect the allotments - details are non-existent at the moment, but there's a meeting a week on Thursday about it, so watch this space...

Digging

2010-02-17T16:56:00.003Z

Something has been digging on our allotment, and it hasn't been us! I went up today to have a look round with the intention of starting off with the allotment again this weekend. In the first bed, the daffodils are coming up nicely; although, as I heard on the radio this morning, the cold winter is delaying the spring flowers, and we might end up with the daffs and tulips coming out together! No sign of any growth at all from the tulips yet, though, so I'm not quite convinced yet.

However, in the bed where we planted the onion sets back in the autumn, there are definite signs of activity (see picture). It looks rather as though something has been digging a few inches down all over that area. I didn't have the tools to investigate much, so I'm not sure if some of the onion sets have been eaten, but even if they have, there are fewer holes that there were sets, so we should get at least some crop. Very odd, though - is it rabbits?

New Year

2010-01-12T18:42:00.003Z

Well, we didn't get any Christmas sprouts after all, but mostly because we got halfway to my parents' house before suddenly remembering that we hadn't picked them after all. I went up to the allotment the week after we got back, though, and discovered a reasonable sprinkling of sprouts on the plants, although some had clearly been nibbled, despite the netting. Having checked over the brassica cage, I discovered that one of the layers of netting had come undone, leaving a huge space that hungry animals could get through to eat our brassicas. I tried to make it good again, to prevent further incursion, but haven't checked again since to see if it's lasted. Hopefully I'll get up there again this weekend, and actually pick some sprouts this time!

Despite the snowy, frosty weather we've had for the past few weeks, the daffodils are starting the come through - here's a picture of some of the larger shoots. It was lovely last year when we had a riot of colour between the daffodils and the tulips, and I'm really looking forward to that again this year.

I had a look over the rest of the plot as well - weeds pretty much under control, unsurprisingly, given the time of year, and no signs of life from the onions yet - but it's still very early for them.

Not long now before I need to start thinking about what we're planting this year. I'm waiting to be told that the seed potatoes have arrived at the allotment shop in town - I should probably chase that up to make sure they're not sitting waiting for me! Other than that, I think we have all the seeds we need already, from last year's packets.

This will be an interesting year for our allotment, as we're expecting a baby in early March (peak seed sowing time!). On the other hand, I'll be off on maternity leave for a few months, and I'm sure the baby can just sit and watch me on the allotment sometimes, can't it? Watch this space...

Planting onions

2009-11-22T17:34:00.002Z

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...

2009-10-18T19:44:00.003+01:00

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

2009-09-27T17:49:00.010+01:00

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

2009-09-08T19:34:00.007+01:00

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

2009-09-03T20:14:00.011+01:00

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

2009-08-18T09:15:00.002+01:00

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

2009-08-11T16:30:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-14T21:25:00.002+01:00

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...

2009-06-09T19:14:00.007+01:00

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

2009-05-31T21:23:00.002+01:00

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

2009-05-25T21:56:00.012+01:00

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

2009-05-18T09:53:00.002+01:00

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

2009-05-04T20:50:00.002+01:00

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)

2009-05-04T18:15:00.018+01:00

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

2009-05-02T12:16:00.013+01:00

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.

2009-04-04T21:42:00.002+01:00

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

2009-03-24T20:39:00.006Z

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

2009-03-15T22:27:00.000Z

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!

2009-03-15T08:51:00.000Z

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

2009-03-08T16:44:00.000Z

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

2009-03-03T08:18:00.000Z

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.

2008-10-25T15:58:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since we updated this, so there's a bit to catch up on. On the right here we have the final crop of lettuce (mid-August), with the few leeks that survived on the right.

We also got a lot of potatoes and apples from the allotment this year - we'll definitely do potatoes again!

Here's the single cob of sweetcorn that we got. The rest of them seemed to have been nibbled by something...

In October, the parish council told us (and many others on the site) that the allotment wasn't neat and tidy enough, and did we really want it. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, we decided that we did still want to keep it going, but would need some more help. We think we have found such, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating - will they actually turn up?

On the right here is how it looked 2 weeks after throwing a whole load of "Round Up" at it in an attempt to get the weeds down. We're unconvinced that it was money well spent - the carpet seems to be far more effective!

As seen above, we rescued the last 8 or so leeks, along with a few cabbages, and put them all together away from the weedkiller. However, something seems to have had other ideas, and we arrived this morning to find them almost all rather nibbled. We suspect deer. We harvested what remained of the leeks - one decent one and several spring onion-like stems.

Anyway, here's Nat & Jeremy with our version of weedkiller:

Something appears to have been living under the pile of carpet that'd been there for a few weeks...

And finally, one good thing from the parish council - a pile of manure, right outside our allotment. It's not that well rotted yet, so we'll probably stow some away for a few more months before spreading it around.

Sweetcorn & caterpillars

2008-08-04T20:49:00.000+01:00

We had fun down the allotment yesterday afternoon. Pádraig & Hilly were visiting, so we showed them round the areas and they decided to pose with each of the vegetables in turn - here they are with the marrows:

Meanwhile, the caterpillars had been busy munching through the broccoli. Note to self: Netting that close to the plants doesn't protect against caterpillars.

The onions have all "flopped", which apparently means they're ready to harvesting - excellent.

And finally, the sweetcorn are beginning to look good. There are still 5 plants, and they each have a head (?) of corn developing nicely. Here's the most photogenic one.

2008-07-20T17:11:00.000+01:00

Ellie and I went down this afternoon. Our plan was to water everything under cover and to dig out more of the second bed. Ellie got on with the digging and I went over to water the carrots. I could see two carrots poking through the bristly ox-tongue, so I opened up the frame to do a bit of weeding.

Oops.

So, today we got three things done: Watering, digging, and rebuilding the carrot frame. Three out of two ain't bad.

2008-07-16T21:16:00.000+01:00

The allotment is now looking rather neat in places, which is very pleasing. Here's the first area, by the gate.

The onions are finally looking like actual onions - about 2 1/2 inches across.

I did a lot of weeding last night around the sweetcorn and artichokes, which I hope they'll thank me for by growing nicely. :)

[Left: before, after]

Finally, the soft fruit cage is passing from the raspberries into the redcurrant season. I picked a small box of raspberries last night, but there weren't really any left after that.

Marrows!

2008-07-14T17:05:00.000+01:00

The courgette plants have been getting on very happily for the last few weeks, especially with all the rain. We harvested about 8 large courgettes/marrows from them at the weekend, with a few normal-sized courgettes left behind for now - I expect they'll be huge when we actually get round to harvesting them.

Everything else is coming along nicely too - it's all covered in some way or another to keep the birds and rabbits from eating everything.

And the last of the cabbage went in this weekend. It's winter cabbage, I think, so it'll be a while before it's ready.

So that just leaves harvesting and continuing to fight back again encroaching weeds...

Yeay rain!

2008-06-27T09:57:00.000+01:00

Went up to the allotment on Tuesday to do a few things, but didn't have time to water. The brussels looked a bit wilty, but the new lettuces seemed well established. Anyway, failed to go and water on Wednesday and Thursday as well. There was a sprinkling of rain but then on Thursday night it rained very heavily. Hurrah! A good bit of sun today and we'll have monster lettuce for the weekend.

Fruit update

2008-06-23T21:36:00.000+01:00

We had intended to leave the fruit for this year as hacking our way into the fruitcage was quite an exercise. However, the raspberry canes seemed to be doing well against the weeds, so we cut our way in and harvested some. The apples are also doing very well, with quite a heavy crop beginning to appear.

Concerted effort.

2008-06-23T21:00:00.000+01:00

Following the terrible neglect while we were away, Nat has put in a lot of work (ably assisted at various points by Nat's Dad, M-A, Kate and Jeremy, but he's been down there a lot) and the allotment is now back under some semblance of control.

The main development has been the acquisition of a hand mower, which has moved on Nat's grand plan for paths. He has a theory that if he mows paths through the weeds then the allotment will look like it's divided into plots but some (most) of them just have weeds in at the moment. He thinks this is working. There is now a very fine path up the side of the plots.

This is a view of the first plot, with happy potatoes in the background, established onions, lettuces in need of harvesting with newly planted broccoli and more lettuce. Kate and Nat tidied this up very quickly in a morning, making the whole thing look more tended.

Nat and his Dad then did some more work on the second plot, planting carrots and brussel sprouts. (Note passable path all the way to the gate - contrast with previous post). Also in this shot are the sweetcorn on the left and the broad beans on the right.

After plantings the carrots and brussels a fellow allotment-holder warned that the woodpigeons had eaten every seedling the night after he planted them, so covers were hastily arranged from anything to hand. In this case half an old chicken run protecting the carrots.

High winds over the weekend called for running repairs to the carrot cage, but all the plants seem to have survived the flattening.

Neglect!

2008-06-11T20:52:00.000+01:00

After two weeks away from the allotment due to holiday this was the sight that greeted the first visit.

The bindweed is binding the gate shut and the nettles have gone crazy.

The leeks have disappeared entirely in a swamp of weeds and I think we'll just have to dig that patch out. On the up side the courgettes are happy and the second lot of beans are well established.

Job for the the weekend is 'cut & compost' (the allotmenter's version of slash'n'burn).

Rabbit!

2008-05-24T17:36:00.000+01:00

The lettuce has been growing nicely, but the tops have all been nibbled off. We spotted a rabbit retreating into the brambles... Have replaced the cloches to give them some more protection. Maybe we should investigate the boundaries and make them more rabbit proof - the current theory is that it got in under part of the gate.

2008-05-18T20:06:00.000+01:00

Nat & I went up to the allotment this afternoon. The potatoes are continuing to grow well, so we mounded them a bit more. The onions are also looking good, as is the sweetcorn. We mostly did weeding and chopping back the weeds near the beds and the edges of the allotment.

Unfortunately, something seems to have eaten almost all the dwarf bean leaves, leaving some very sorry-looking stems. I'm not sure if they'll recover from that.

When we got back, I potted out the brussels sprout and carrot seedlings into bigger pots, to let them get a bit bigger before the go in the allotment.

Watering Weds 14th May

2008-05-14T21:17:00.000+01:00

Went down this evening and gave everything a quick water (now it'll definitely rain tomorrow!), under the watchful eyes of 4 robins, numerous rooks and I think a jay though the light was too poor to be sure. Pictures show a potato flower (several of them are flowering- are they supposed to do that?) and the beans looking slightly happier than they were last Saturday.

2008-05-10T18:30:00.001+01:00

There were four of us today - me, Nat, Simon & Ellie. We managed to get a surprising amount done in the time. Here's Simon & Ellie earthing up the potatoes. We've got another lot of potatoes to go in some time soon as well, but the first lot had suddenly reached the point where they needed some earthing.

Ellie & Nat also set to with the shears on the weeds in the orchard area, so you can now get through to the soft fruit cage again!

The final main achievement of the day was creating a double compost heap from some wood that the hospice were clearing out last weekend. Why double? So that you've got one side rotting down nicely and one side that you're actively adding to...

Other odds & ends: I finally planted out a couple of rows of broad beans, next to the dwarf beans. The sweetcorn is now out as well - I read that it doesn't like being handled, so I hope it's not too unhappy!

One final thing: we now have a shared Google calendar to co-ordinate activity: ask M-A for details if you haven't had an email already.

2008-05-07T11:41:00.000+01:00

We've now planted out the dwarf beans in the middle bed, near the artichokes that various other allotmenters have given us. The cougettes also went out this weekend, near the onions. The onion sets and potatoes seem to be happy, although the leeks and spring onions aren't showing many signs of life just yet.

One tomato seed seems to have sprouted, although no guarantees that it's not a weed as yet! The tarragon and second batch of sweetcorn haven't done much, though, so we've just got the 6 sweetcorn plants in the end. They seem to have survived being put into larger pots, despite all the warnings I read on the internet about them objecting to their roots being disturbed.

We've put the cabbage seedlings into pots in the back garden, and they seem to be coming along fine - we'll plant them out in a few weeks or so, I reckon.

Nat's taken the shears to some of the low-level weeds around the apple trees, which has tidied that up a bit. Still a long way to go, though - the weeds are doing terribly well!

Final thing - I planted some garlic last autumn, which is looking, well, OK. Not exactly flourishing, but hopefully we might get one or two bulbs out of it.

2008-04-27T22:00:00.000+01:00

The apple tree is in bloom! The raspberries and redcurrants are also looking good, although we need to do some structural work to the soft fruit cage - it's all sagging at the moment.

Nat's Grandad gave us a tray of seedlings - lettuce and two (possibly) types of cabbage.

The lettuces under cloches. We had great trouble clipping the ends into the cloches, but we got there in the end.

Nat's Grandad also gave us a ridger, which will come in very handy for the potatoes! Here's Nat trying it out in his Grandad's back garden.

In other (non-pictorial) news - the fenugreek has sprouted, as have the potatoes and the onion sets. The seeds at home are looking good too - the courgettes are now in their own pots, and about 6" high each. The sweetcorn didn't like being puts into separate pots so much, but it's also about 6" high. The "purple queen" beans are about 8" high.

I've started off a 2nd batch of sweetcorn, some tomato seeds and some tarragon. That was a week ago, and no signs of life yet, but it's early days there.

In the back garden seed trays, the carrots finally sprouted, as did the 2nd lot of lettuce, after the first batch failed to do anything at all. There are also a few broccoli and brussels sprouts seedlings visible.

2008-04-16T08:35:00.000+01:00

The indoor seeds have (mostly) sprouted now - courgettes, sweetcorn (top shelf) and purple beans (bottom shelf). The yellow beans (middle shelf) haven't shown any signs of doing anything yet, so I've left them wrapped up for now.

I've read that the next step is to move them into individual pots. I've got quite a few of those, from Freecycle, so that's a job for after the weekend - or earlier if anyone else fancies a go!

Life!

2008-04-13T16:44:00.000+01:00

Things are beginning to spring into life! (above - apple trees, right - raspberry canes)

Also this weekend, Simon & Ellie dug a new bed and planted it up with Fenugreek, a green fertiliser which should be good for the soil.

Some of the weed roots we dug up...

Sunshine and snow

2008-04-10T16:17:00.001+01:00

We had sunshine and snow during a satisfying session of digging and weeding on Sunday 6th. And I had very sore muscles the next day!

More planting...

2008-03-29T16:49:00.000Z

Forgot to take a camera, so no photos but Nat and I went over to the allotment today, so I thought I'd post an update.

We planted the next batch of potatoes - Maris Piper (maincrop) - next to the first batch. And we also planted some onions in the area nearest the gate, next to the spring onions and leeks.

We also made a fair bit of progress on digging the next area, near where the path bends round the bramble. We think we'll split the bed and put tall stuff like sweetcorn on the side nearest the path, and maybe something like lettuces in the bed furthest from the path. Interestingly we didn't find any more signs of potatoes in that bed, so maybe that will be a good place to plant potatoes next year.

We also took some junk (including the very rusty green barrel and the old metal gate) down to the tip, which should tidy things up a bit. Oh, and Nat put the carpet down on the area near the orchard, so hopefully that will keep things at bay until we get there.

Maybe one of us will take some photos tomorrow anyway...

First planting

2008-03-25T21:03:00.001Z

A couple of weeks ago, we were given a redcurrant bush, which has now gone in the middle of the soft fruit area. A few of the plants down there are beginning to sprout leaves, and they look a bit like raspberries, which'd be nice. There were also rumours of gooseberries, but no evidence as yet.

Thanks to various ad-hoc digging expeditions, the first area is now mostly dug over and de-rooted, so it's time to put some things in!

The area nearest the camera has got seed potatoes in, Second Early Maris Piper to be precise.

The area on the far left has leek and spring onions seeds in rows at interesting angles. The rest is only roughly dug, and not so thoroughly weeded yet.

Jeremy bought some other seed potatoes too, which are mostly being chitted (put them in the light, in the cool and wait for the sprouts to reach a few inches or so) in our garden shed. The Maris Piper earlies already had decent sprouts on them, so we thought they were worth planting.

We filled a few seed trays with compost too today, and put seeds in: brussels sprouts, carrots, lettuce, broccoli and parsnips.

That just leaves the remaining seeds as courgettes (plant Apr-Jun), Sweetcorn (Apr-May), the coloured dwarf beans (Apr-Jun), Spinach (Mar-Sep), and the other lettuce (Apr-Jul). There are also some more carrot seeds, so they can be planted in a few weeks, to get a 2nd crop.

Finally, having heard how hard onions are to grow from seed, we bought some onion sets. They're not in yet, but some time in the next couple of weeks would be good...

The plan

2008-03-25T19:11:00.000Z

We looked at all the seeds we got from Paul, and chose the ones that were in date and that we fancied eating - so no peas (Jeremy's veto).

We then put together a plan of what could go where, missing out the patches of really tough weeds that can wait for later in the year.

The story so far...

2008-03-25T18:30:00.001Z

The original state of the allotment - weeds 6' high. Jeremy and Nat tackled them with a hired strimmer.

The first harvest! Cheating really, but the apples were unpicked and at the end of their season when we took over the allotment.

Digging over the first section of ground, ready for planting.

We spotted a pile of wood chippings at the entrance to the allotments, and created a passable path with them.

So far, we've been burning the weeds in an incinerator that we found on Freecycle, rather than composting them, which would run the risk of the seeds surviving.