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.

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

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.