Back to the plot!

We have been very lax so far this year, having hardly been to the plot at all, but we both went down today.

While I went off to the committee meeting, MrUrban dug up our Jerusalem Artichokes, sorted out the bed they were in and then put some back for this year. So we have quite a big bucket of JAs to eat our way through.

After the meeting finished I got to work on some weeding and tidying and MrUrban sowed some pea and bean seeds in biodegradable pots. That worked quite well last year, so we decided to do it again. I think they are Borlotta, Pink Lady, Runner, Purple Dwarf, and Broad on the bean front and Starlight, Ambassador and Kelvedon Wonder for the peas, like last year.

I had a good wander round the plot too, to see how it was all doing. The strawberries look happy enough, and the runners we took off and potted up in the Leanhouse are doing well too - even a flower on one of them. The soft fruit bushes have lots of healthy looking leaves and shoots too.

The fig trees in the Leanhouse have tiny little fruits starting off which is cheering, I hope we will be able to look after them and get them to ripen. I'm not going to bring them out of the Leanhouse yet as I think there could still be frosts which would do for those fruit.

The only other thing growing is purple sprouting broccoli, but it is a bit small and sad looking. But between the 3 tiny plants we may manage one batch of Stilton and Broccoli soup eventually.

ship shape in the evenings

The light evenings since the clocks changed have made a big difference to our workrate.

The first job came from a windfall. The community group that has a plot on our site is doing a load of work at the moment, they have had some luck with funding and resource allocation, so will be making a big push to sort out the space we have given them, with our help. This means a certain amount of clearing of their plot, one of which has a lot of gravel in it. Our Secretary made sure that they weren't considering just throwing it away and we are now working at moving it around to where it is needed.

First lot he moved to a big boggy area on the main path, and then a second batch we wheeelbarrowed away to our Leanhouse™ to make a floor for it. It is particularly boggy there (one of the reasons for siting it there - the soil was too damp to use as a bed) but now it has a ground sheet down and gravel on top, to keep the weeds at bay, make it look a little neater, and improve drainage. There is still plenty of gravel though, so we will have to get some other uses for it going. Probably communal paths.


This also coincided nicely with us retiring some metal shelves from use at home, so we reconfigured those as Leanhouse™ staging, putting the shelves on the wrong way up to form shallow trays. They are the perfect size for grow bags and seed trays. They cost us a few pounds about 10 years ago, so we are definitely getting our money's worth!


They are almost full now a couple of days later, we have mixed salad, peas, beans, broccoli, kale, chard, lettuce, all sorts of stuff just sowed or as young seedlings, in there.

Also in are the potatoes, we have gone for Arran Pilots and Desiree this year. We used compost from our functional bath, the Bath o' Salad, to go in the trenches, and then refilled the bath with new stuff ready for lettuce seedlings, which are now in.

And then last night we did a bit of spring cleaning rather than planting. We had put the last of our home produced compost in an old broken bath which was sitting there and looking unattractive and taking up room, so I dragged out a black compost bin and transferred it all to that. The cracked bath is now in the skip. Once that was gone we rediscovered a metal arch underneath it, so that has now been installed in the middle of the 'flower' bed ready for sweet peas to climb up.

And the old strawberry plants have been transplanted from their overgrown bed to a nicely cleared new one. That leaves up clear to do some serious grass removal in that bed in preparation for the squash going in.

All in all it is coming together, I reckon a couple more evenings and we may have it in a fairly neutral state, with all the beds ready to go.

Back Down To It

I've been a bit lax of late, in blogging here and in going to the allotment. But I'm back to it now.

We have actually been doing quite a bit, but it has been in our flat. We have a small heated propagator and several unheated ones that we have been starting everything off in, and it is turning into quite a production line now.

And several things have made it to the allotment already. Corn, courgettes, tomatoes (several kinds), aubergines, peppers, chillies.



We have also set off plenty of things in the greenhouse at the plot: lettuce of various kinds, including a salad leaf mix, scarlett chard, peas, broad beans, and various herbs and flowers.


Also yesterday I did a bit of DIY pot making. We received a parcel the other day that had tubes of paper scrunched up in it. It was perforated so that they could just tear off as much as was needed. As with most things these days we looked at it and asked 'do you think we could so something with that at the allotment?'. It turns out: biodegradable pots for beans/peas/sweet peas. They don't like root disturbance (their growth slows down for quite a while after being moved too roughly) so it is ideal to have a pot that they don't have to be taken out of when you move them on to their final location.

I separated the paper into a tube about 20cm long, twisted the base together and then turned the whole thing inside out so the twisted base was inside. I put a couple of beans in each, and also did some with 5 sweet pea seeds in each which can just get planted out whole when it gets warm enough.

We will see how they hold up, I'm hoping they don't disintegrate before I want them to!

tomato farm

I now have a veritable forest of tomatoes and other heat loving things on my kitchen windowsill.

5 types of tomatoes, 1 type of chilli, 1 type of pepper, 1 kind of aubergine. Plus some pansies, busy lizzies, lobelia.


Next will be squashes, gerbera, pinks, and marigolds.

I'm aiming for a bed fiull of flowers and a greenhouse full of tomatoes.

true leaves

I'm quite excited today, my tomato seedlings have started to get their true leaves.

Only one has died before getting to this point, the Banana Cream. I remember not having much luck with that last year, it took ages to germinate, so I'm assuming it needs much higher temperatures. I'll leave it til later in the year.



The others are looking strong and healthy, if still tiny. I got worried about night temperatures after the Banana Cream started to shrivel so I put plastic bags (with vent holes poked in the top) over the pots. They look a lot happier since I did that. I whip the bags off to let them have a bit of air during the day.

Long Purple Bolivian Robin Maker

Or something like that!

I've been enjoying seed variety names today. I put 2 types of tomato, 1 sweet pepper, 1 chilli, and 1 aubergine into the heated propagator today and was luxuriating in the marvellous sounding titles. I think Purple Calabash is my favourite, but Red Robin comes a close second as it just seems so descriptive of the lovely little bushy plants of cherry tomatoes that it will produce - perky and cheeky!

On a grey day like today the exotic, warm sounding names were giving me a lot of joy. However as well as the Doux Long des Landes, and Bolivian Rainbow their was one name that is recognisable, steady and traditional sounding.

Exerting a calming influence the reliable Aubergine Money Maker will keep the rest of these flighty numbers in line!

Artichokes are go!

Well we got ourselves organised and planted the J. Artichokes today. We made a separate bed last year as there was a wasted bit of space at one side of the allotment, so we figured that was a good space for them. It is a bit sheltered from the wind and also not connected to any other bed, so volunteer ones next year (which seem to be guaranteed from what people say).

We also dropped off our 2 new fruit bushes, bought from Lidl for 99p each. We got raspberry, gooseberry, redcurrant and white currant last year. They all did well and we got lots of fruit off them, so we decided to add blackberry to the mix. They will go into the hedge on the western edge of our plot, which is where moved our tayberry to last week. Edible hedge here we come.

Jerusalem Artichokes

In a lovely bit of serendipity my first batch of 'seed' Jerusalem Artichokes arrived today, and Hugh Fearnley-Whitinstall featured some lovely recipes for this knobly veg in today's Guardian.

I know it will be a year before I will be able to use them, but it pleased me that they both came to my attention on the same day. I'm going to pdf them and save them.

We are going to try and get them into the ground tomorrow, but if they ground is too hard the (good and clear Organic Gardening Catalogue) planting instructions say that we should store them in damp soil until we can. So either way it is a trip to the plot.

We have another box to come (I confused myself when ordering!) so we are going to do a swap with another friend for something else. I'm hoping he has squash seeds.

Tomato-tastic II

The 8 tomato seedlings have been transferred now; 4 to a smallish terracotta pot. I'm hoping to keep them in these until they are big enough to get moved to their final pots, probably in April.

I planted them quite deep, as they had got quite leggy. They seem to be doing OK so far. I kept them in the heated propagator for the first day and night, and then moved them out of it this morning.

Here's hoping for good strong plants this year.

Tomato-tastic!

We bought a little 7w heated propagator the other day to start off our tomatoes, chillies and aubergines at home. Last year we couldn't start off our seeds until quite late in the season and with the rubbish rainy summer they didn't really get far enough along, a lot never ripened at all. We got something off them, but the real stars were the tiny 80p plants we bought (Shirley, Golden Sunrise, and a Plum I think) .

So the plan this year is to get the plants from our seeds to a similar size before taking them to the allotment. We decided to try 2 of each of our heritage seeds from last year first, we had 4 seeds of each left and had slow and patchy germination last year: Vintage Wine, which is a kind of knobbly stripy one ; Banana Cream, which has long 'plum' type yellow fruits; Christmas Grape, which produces vines of small cherry toms; and Lemon Tree, which has surprisingly lemon looking fruit, right down to the point at the end!


And so far 2 of each of everything except the Banana Cream have come up. In just a week. The Banana Cream took longer than all the others to come up last year, so I expect that to pop up in a few days. Then we will stick them in a normal propagator, and then pots, and try and them get a bit bigger ready for transferring to the allotment.

Next on the list are: Red Robin tomatoes, little bushes of cherry ones; Purple Calabash, lovely knobbly dark red/black ones; Bolivian Rainbow chillies, and Money Maker aubergines.

Here is hoping for a good crop this year.

Frosty Windy New Year

We went down to the plot for the first real amount of time since the New Year the other day. There had been high winds earlier in the week and our fence had been knocked over (which pepette kindly told us about through this blog) so we firstly fixed that. Not much else had been damaged or whisked away by the wind, and the only damage was caused by a bit of corrugated plastic from someone another plot landing on our broccoli and sprouts. Fortunately our broccoli and sprouts were rubbish anyway so we haven't really lost anything there.

We got the stove going pretty quickly which kept us warm while we were there, which was enjoyable.



We have bought some seeds from Garden Organic and some seed potatoes and jerusalem artichoke slips. We plan to get a little heated propagator for home to start off some things, and to start off some others in the greenhouse soon. When it is a little bit warmer. For now I think it is a matter of clearing up some of the beds (pulling out the rubbish broccoli) and covering some with plastic to try and warm them up.

So those are the next jobs, and the fixing up of our shed floor and a bench, and the LeanHouse™ and a bench for there too.

Plans for Autumn

Our seeds have arrived from the Organic Gardening Catalogue so the next few days before we go on holiday will be spent sowing seeds so that they have hopefully have germinated by the time we return.

The beetroot, radish, and turnips will get sown direct into the beds (I will harvest the beetroot and carrots that are in at the moment), but the spring onion, endive, swiss chard, and lettuce will get sown in trays for later transplanting outside. I'll probably only be able to do that with one sowing unless we have a very mild autumn, but after that I hope to be able to continue with lettuce and endive in a cold frame or the lean-house™ through the winter. I already have some little gem lettuce going which I'm going to put in all the gaps that are emerging as things get harvested. They aren't quite big enough to go out yet, but they are getting there.

I'm also considering a fig tree, I've been wanting one for ages and I don't think I can stop myself any longer. The choice is now Gardening Express or Guardian. I had some lovely witch hazels from Gardening Express, so maybe I should go with them. Hopefully the tree will come with small fruit already on it.

<edit> Just noticed that you get 15 free Purple Alliums with the Guardian, so that might swing it!

June update

I've been hugely remiss in posting up what we are up to, so here is a little update and I'll try and be more regular with it from now on.

Since the last post our greenhouse produce has come on leaps and bounds. We now have tomatoes on the 4 plants we bought as little 80p seedlings, aubergines forming, chilies growing away, and now the cucumber is starting to produce flowers. This is all from the plants we bought, the ones we planted from seed are all doing well, but aren't quite at that stage yet.

Out on the plot the peas and beans are flowering and starting to form pods, the shallots and red onions look like they are doing well and so does the garlic. Early potatoes (Arran Pilots) have flowered, and the main crop are just starting to I think. We did have a minor incident where a bit of metal fence fell on the potatoes but it just snapped a few branches off and crushed a few plants, which have survived to tell the tale. I'm going to take up one of the early potato plants this weekend to see if they are ready for eating.

The one big bed below the fruit cage (see bottom right here ) has now been divided into 3 beds (north south) so that we can get into it, it was just too big to deal with before. In there are now purple sprouting broccoli, sprouts, lettuce, squash and some courgette seeds. Some of the courgettes have come up but not all.

Fruit is doing well, we have had plenty of strawberries and today for the first time some raspberries. Problem now is that we are spolit and can't go back to eating shop bought strawberries - I had forgotten what home grown ones tasted like. The gooseberries are getting bigger and some look like they are starting to ripen.

And we are overcome with weeds! Mare's Tail, Dock, Thistles, Nettles, Couch Grass. I'm considering glysophate, I'd rather not, but I don't know if we will ever clear it any other way. At the moment we are pulling out and drying or drowing weeds that are likely to survive the heap in the hope of exhausting them, but I think they are exhausting us!

Next plan for the plot is extending the greenhouse (to the right on the plan, making it twice the length it is now). We have 2 more of those window panes, but I think we could do a bit of jigging around with what is there already and with the addition of some kind of heat sink back wall to fill in the bit we don't have windows for it should work. Like so:

So that is what has been happening.

Parsley?

So, is this my parsley?

It is coming up where my parsley seeds went in, but so were quite a lot of round leafed seedlings too. I pulled out the round leafed ones and left these. Please someone tell me I've done it the right way round?

These are planted in the bath o' salad ™ which is doing really well. It was on the plot when we got it, we drilled a few holes in the bottom to help it drain and then half sank it into the ground. It has cut and come again spicy salad leaves and some small parmex carrots.

sunflowers!

The blackberry is now in and while I was there I potted the rapidly growing sunflower seeds into medium-ish pots from the propagator.

We have 3 kinds Evening Sun, Teddy Bear (lovely fuzzy ones) and Sun Spot. I'm looking forward to them.