Busy busy busy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, well, well...

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

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

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

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

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

Brassicas, carrots, and water

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

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

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

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

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

Spring Bank Holiday Weekend

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

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



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





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





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


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




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




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

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

Courgettes and squashes

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

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

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

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

Missing Link

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

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

Bank Holiday Weekend (2)

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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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