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.

Ellie and I went down this afternoon. Our plan was to water everything under cover and to dig out more of the second bed. Ellie got on with the digging and I went over to water the carrots. I could see two carrots poking through the bristly ox-tongue, so I opened up the frame to do a bit of weeding.

Oops.

So, today we got three things done: Watering, digging, and rebuilding the carrot frame. Three out of two ain't bad.

The allotment is now looking rather neat in places, which is very pleasing. Here's the first area, by the gate.





The onions are finally looking like actual onions - about 2 1/2 inches across.

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I did a lot of weeding last night around the sweetcorn and artichokes, which I hope they'll thank me for by growing nicely. :)

[Left: before, after]

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Finally, the soft fruit cage is passing from the raspberries into the redcurrant season. I picked a small box of raspberries last night, but there weren't really any left after that.

Marrows!

The courgette plants have been getting on very happily for the last few weeks, especially with all the rain. We harvested about 8 large courgettes/marrows from them at the weekend, with a few normal-sized courgettes left behind for now - I expect they'll be huge when we actually get round to harvesting them.

Everything else is coming along nicely too - it's all covered in some way or another to keep the birds and rabbits from eating everything.

And the last of the cabbage went in this weekend. It's winter cabbage, I think, so it'll be a while before it's ready.

So that just leaves harvesting and continuing to fight back again encroaching weeds...

Yeay rain!

Went up to the allotment on Tuesday to do a few things, but didn't have time to water. The brussels looked a bit wilty, but the new lettuces seemed well established. Anyway, failed to go and water on Wednesday and Thursday as well. There was a sprinkling of rain but then on Thursday night it rained very heavily. Hurrah! A good bit of sun today and we'll have monster lettuce for the weekend.

Fruit update

We had intended to leave the fruit for this year as hacking our way into the fruitcage was quite an exercise. However, the raspberry canes seemed to be doing well against the weeds, so we cut our way in and harvested some. The apples are also doing very well, with quite a heavy crop beginning to appear.