yesterday and today (and tomorrow)

Weeding, weeding and more weeding mainly.

You can now actually see between the rows of strawberries, and the rows of onions.



And the Jerusalem artichokes aren't having to fight with the docks.

The squash have got some room round them too now. And they are starting to form fruit, I'm very excited by the yellow ones and the round ones.

And I got the sweetcorn in, a block of 3 by 3 up next to the Kale, garlic, carrots, and turnips.


We got a load of flower seedlings into pots too. Tomorrow I need to get the salad out from the leanhouse, it is too hot for it in there and it will bolt if I'm not careful.

more growing, less typing

I've been neglecting this blog, so my apologies.

However, you will be pleased to know that I haven't been doing quite so badly on the allotment. It is still a running battle between us and the weeds, but we are winning in enough areas to have some decent crops going on.

So, a catch up post. In May things just kept on growing. I was away on Skye for a while, but everything survived my absence. The summer squash and courgettes went into the beds, the salad started filling out the bath and the peas and beans grew like crazy.


In June this first bit of June we have got our scarlet kale in, potted up our peppers and chillis to bigger pots, saw the Jerusalem artichokes shoot up, and loads of fruit and flowers appear.

The tomatoes have started to flower, the vintage wine and red robins are furthest along: the biggest and smallest fruit.


And the sweet peas have been planted to grow up the old metal frame we put in our flower 'meadow'.

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.

A Happy Spring Day!

Yesterday was such a beautiful day, and I got a serious case of allotment joy! It was an amazing day, I was working in short sleeves and we sat outside the shed in the sun to eat our packed lunch.

I had been a bit disheartened by the number of weeds, overgrown grass, and messy looking beds but we got a grip on a couple of them yesterday and I started to feel a lot more positive. I can really see it coming together again quickly now.

I also realised that two of my purple sprouting broccoli plants were salvageable; I had about 6-8 and I thought all of them were too tiny and stunted from the rubbish wet year we had. So, when I went to totally clear out the bed that they were in, I was delighted to discover might actually get a 2008 crop.

When we got the allotment last year (very close to this time of year) the only thing that we could harvest from the previous occupant's crops was the purple sprouting broccoli, and we made some great soup from it. I'm so glad that one year on we may have another crop.

Compost

We had a look at our home compost heap today, as it needed a tidy around it, and it seems to be doing quite well. We just have one of the subsidised 'council' bins. You can check with Recycle Now by putting in your postcode to see if there is a deal via your local council.

We have been throwing in all our 'fresh' kitchen waste, shredded bills/receipts, sometimes our cat's paper based litter, and a minimal amount of cuttings and weeds from our small garden.

The big issue will be what we do with it once it is done. Our garden in too small to use it (and mostly paved) so we will have to work out a transport system to get it to the allotment. Could be an interesting day!

Another bout of weeding

You can now see our cabbages and onions a bit better, as we had a massive weeding session around them, they seem to be doing rather well, although there are only a few onions still in.


Most of them are drying on a rack in the greenhouse. I'm glad we did it, they are the first two beds we see as we come in the gate and it is much nicer now they are free of weeds. It was also nice not to be building something, but actually getting up close and personal with the soil and plants.

But . . . on the drying and building front, we are thinking of trying to make a solar airer/dehydrator. Saw a thing on TV on the "it's not easy being green' programme, and I think we have all the bits we need: wood, glass, black plastic, wire mesh. And hopefully soon we will have lots of tomatoes, so it would be good to be able to dry some and have our own dried tomatoes to put in pasta and on pizzas. Might as well make use of the warm sunny weather while it is here.

weeds, weeds and more weeds

We had a marathon weeding session on Saturday, the beds with broccoli and lettuce in, the strawberry bed and the cabbage beds. All were absolutely covered in green, looking very scruffy. Now they are lovely and neat.



The greenhouse is awash with greenery, some of the tomato plants we started from seeds are starting to get flowers.



Still don't have our plastic for the greenhouse so it is still a naked frame. I'm promised that it will arrive tomorrow afternoon though. I had forgotten that it was a bank holiday here in Scotland today, so that scuppered my cladding plans.

Sauerkraut

Well, in a few months time anyway.

Today the cabbages and cauliflowers from Gert went in. We thoroughly weeded the bed (bottom left) which means there are probably only a million tiny pieces of whatever evil pervasive root seems to populate out plot. We then heeled the bed down as brassicas prefer well firmed ground. Next we dug holes - we did this a bit closer than the reccomended spacings as we want to harvest them small and young. We also alternated rows of the earlier maturing cabbages with the slightly longer cauliflowers which means alternate rows will come up, leaving more room for the cauliflowers later. Or that is the theory.

Also watching Gardener's World on Friday night finally got us to get round to taking out copper pipe and fixings down to the plot. We had some left over from doing the bathroom and now it is around the cabbage bed to try and keep the slugs off. We need to get some nemotodes too, to try and kill off the ones that are no doubt hiding in there.

We 'puddled in' the cabbages. Once the hole was dug for each plant some compost went in the bottom and then the plants went in. Then the hole was filled up with water and allowed to soak away, and then filled again and allowed to soak away again, before the hole was backfilled and firmed around the plant. I'm assuming this is to send the water down below the cabbage to encourage it to send roots long roots down, but I don't really know.

They now have fleece over them to protect them a little.