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.