Bank Holiday Weekend

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




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



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





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




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

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

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

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

Weekend Progress

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

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

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

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



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

Netting order

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

Plan!

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

First planting

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

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

New Season

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



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




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



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