Off we go again

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

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?

• Marina di Chioggia pumpkin
• Zucca of Napoli pumpkin
• Berrettina Piacentina pumpkin
• Rugosa Butternut squash
• Serpente di Sicilia squash

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

... 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

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

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

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

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

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!