The Big Potato and Strawberry Experiments

Over the recent Bank Holiday weekend I was looking forwards to getting onto the plot and really getting stuck into the multitude of tasks that have built up.

Unfortunately things didn't quite go as I had planned, and I was only able to get down there on Monday, but I still managed to get plenty done.





Potatoes in several different containers

The first earlies that I had put into buckets on Easter Monday (April 5th) had taken almost four weeks to show themselves, but since then have gone from strength to strength as you can see from the picture to the left.  I have since managed to get all my first and second earlies out  and also my early maincrop by the middle of May (Bambino, Pentland Javelin, Mary's Rose and Colleen).  Some are in buckets and some I am trying in old compost bags for the first time, which should be interesting to see how they do.

 

I still have my maincrop (Pink Fir Apple and Sarpo Mira) to get in, but I am not too worried about them right now.  They will use up the remaining space on the weed fabric where my wood pile is on the picture above.

 

Last year I got a home-made cold frame off FreeCycle, but I only started to use it this year.



I have used it to harden off my cauliflowers, onions, lettuce and spinach, and apart from a couple of days when some rather large slugs took a liking to a few of the spinach plants it has been quite a success, even after some strong winds ripped the lid clean off - thankfully the glass didn't break.

The cauliflowers from the cold frame have now been planted out - I am spacing them slightly further apart than I have before as I found that they grew together quite quickly with the result that some heads were fairly small.

I have planted a total of 12 seedlings approximately 18 inches apart (last year was 12) and they have been netted against thedreaded cabbage white and also slug pelleted. so hopefully they will all survibe to give us a nice crop come autumn.

Also planted out this week, but from the greenhouse was the sweetcorn.

These were sown onto a root trainer, and from the 33 seeds planted 32 germinated and were planted out (2 were in a single cell), so that's not a bad success rate :)  The variety is Conqueror F1

The bed that they have been planted into has had a top layer of compost added, but no other nutrients and I will add canes and other supports as necessary thoughout the season.

Jack's Patch

My 2 year old grandson has recently started coming to the plot with me on Sundays, and so I have given him his own little raised bed to plant what he wants.

So far he has 4 Little Gem Lettuce, six Malabar Spinach, three Red Sun Shallots and eight strawberries.  There are also two buckets of potatoes, one Pentland Javelin and one other (not sure which variety)

There is plenty of space left for a pumpkin or two as well.

Strawberry Heaven

Last year most of my strawberries were planted straight into the ground and gave a good yield, but I did lose quite a few to slugs and birds.

I experimented with planting them through weed fabric in the smaller bed, and these seemed to have less losses so I have repeated the experiment on two out of the three strawberry beds this year.

Looking at the picture I have just realised that I have forgotten about the hanging baskets between the beds - they also need replanting.


More Strawberries

I have a total of 29 plants in these two beds, with about another 35 in the long bed at the back, and another 24 which I bought from Aldi earlier this season and are still waiting to go in.

The raspberry/blackberry bed to the left in the picture was going to be cleared and also turned over to strawberries this year, but I think I may have left it just a little too late as there is far too much growth going on over there, and I am a bit worried that I might end up killing them off if I move them when they are in full swing.

Broad Beans

I planted out half a bed of broad beans aroung the middle of April, and they have all put on quite a bit of growth since then

I used two varieties this year, Crinson Flowering and Bunyard's Exhibition.

Because I haven't kept on top of the grass at the back of the bed the Bunyard's have suffered a bit from slug attacks, but a scattering of pellets seems to have held them back for a while until I can strim the grass one night this week.















How did it get to the end of May so soon?

I can't believe that we are now almost at the end of May already.

Seed potatoes waiting to be planteed

It feels like I have done almost nothing on the plot, there are plenty of beds that need topping up with compost, half of my seed potatoes are still waiting to get planted out and the majority of the seeds I had planned to grow this year are way past their optimal time for sowing.  I was going to lift the strawberries and replant them through weed fabric, but that should have been done whilst they were still mostly dormant back in March.



Finally up and ready for use

We weren't even able to inspect the bees on time, so they swarmed and we lost half of them as we couldn't collect the swarm.

There have been some high points recently as well - the greenhouse that I got from FreeCycle is finally up and fastened securely to the flags that make up its base and being well used.

Jack's Patch on April 26th

My grandson Jack has come to the plot with me a few times and has got his own bed for planting in right next to the seating area where he can be looked after.  He is only just two, so his helping involves jumping in muddy puddles and throwing compost and soil over himself at every opportunity, but it does lift my heart to see him having such a good time outdoors.

Shallots, Little Gens and Spinach planted

I am hoping that by having his own growing space and encouraging him to plant what he wants he may be more inclined to taste fruit and veg he might otherwise not try.  I can live in hope, anyway.

The first early potatoes that I put in on Easter Monday have finally shown their heads and are looking to be strong plants, so I hope that I can get a decent crop from them when they are ready for harvest which should be around my birthday, the first week of July.

It remains to be seen if their somewhat delayed start will mean that they are not ready for a few weeks after this - I will wait for them to flower and the foliage to wilt before tipping them out.

I'm sure that Jack will give me a helping hand and will appropriate most of them to take home to his mum for dinner.



Tomatoes, Celeriac, Chillis, Pumpkins, Courgettes,Shallots

I have rescued the shallots from the old polytunnel where they have been sat since October last year and pretty much neglected.

A couple of the tomatoes I started at the beginning of March have also survived and have been potted on along with some little gems, spinach and celeriac, and I bought a small pack of cauliflower plugs from Aldi which are doing well in the cold frame.
I have also sown far too many courgetes and pumpkins (in the plastic cups to the right of the picture) , but I wanted to make sure that I had at least one pumpkin for Jack's Patch.  As of this morning I have three pumpkins and eight courgettes :)

It's now the end of March, and things are finally starting to come together on the plot.

New Fruit Bed

The new fruit bed has been completed and filled with the grape vine and six raspberries transplanted from the old bed where they and the blackberries had been swamping the strawberries.


The first bed that I created back in 2012 and has been used as a square foot bed ever since has been cleared, weeded and is now ready to be topped up with compost before the weather gets nice enough

Fruit bushes on the move

For some time now I have come to realise that the bed in which I had originally planted my raspberries wasn't really fit for purpose.

Overgrown raspberries and blackberries

The bed is 2'6" wide, which in itself is OK, but it backs directly onto another bed which contains strawberries and is also 2' wide. The net result of this is that I found it impossible to reach half the fruit at the back of the bed. I have never had much fruit from the seven raspberries I planted back in 2012 anyway, so I decided that I would move them into a couple of much thinner beds between the polytunnel and the veg beds that can be accessed from both sides which I hope will help me look after them better.

It rained quite a bit through the afternoon on Monday, but it had brightened up considerably after work so I decided to spend the last hour of daylight down at the plot and get started on moving the fruit.

Last winter I had been given a grape vine but hadn't really done anything with it, just propped it up still in it's pot and basically left it to fend for itself apart from watering when it got too dry. As a result of this cavalier attitude the tiny grapes that formed over the summer didn't do much, so I decided to move this first, and put it in the middle of one of the 12' long, 20" wide beds that I have earmarked for fruit.

New Grape and Raspberry bed

The plan is that the supporting wires I will put up for the grape can be used by the raspberries that I will plant on either side of the main stem. The few weeds that had colonised this bed since I made it last September came out easily with the exception of one dock that had massive roots . I managed to cut these off about six inches below the surface, but I will have to keep an eye out for it resurfacing in the future. From past experience I know that these can be a nuisance.

The grape vine had already been trained into two main branches so I trimmed it back to a foot or so above the split and planted it in the center of the bed. I planted it slightly higher in the bed than it had been in the pot as I am intending on filling the bed up slightly when I plant the raspberries.

Now the grape was out of the way I got on with the task of cutting back the raspberries. Raspberries come in two main varieties which are either summer or autumn fruiting. Summer fruiting ones should be cut back to the ground straight after harvest but the autumn ones are merely trimmed to about 2 foot high.

As I didn't really know which varieties I had I decided to cut them all back to their base which would then make digging them out and replanting much easier. Having never been pruned back before, the whole bed was a veritable thicket, and as I also soon discovered, they weren't all raspberries!

 I had originally bought three bare-rooted raspberries from Aldi, and three bare rooted redcurrants which I thought had actually turned out to be raspberries as well but it now looks like these three and possibly one or two of the others were actually blackberries!

 As I delved further into the bed the stems at the base were nearly an inch thick, and absolutely covered in wicked thorns which went straight through my gloves. I changed into my heavy duty rigger gloves to deal with these, but even then I still got pricked a few times.

Spiky Blackberries

 I don't particularly want blackberries on my plot as they tend to take over a bit, which partly explains why this bed had become so unmanageable, so I have asked if I can replant these in the waste area against the border fence adjacent to my plot. The corner nearest to me has been used in the past by kids getting onto the allotment and I had already arranged that I could dump the spiky raspberry and brambles there as a deterrent which should make them think twice about climbing over, and if these brambles take root and thrive we will have a good blackberry harvest in a couple of years.

With the light failing I didn't manage to get too far with clearing the bed, but at least I have started. I hope to get back there on Friday to finish off, or at least get a good portion of it done at least.

'The Bee Hives Are Burning!'

One Sunday night in the middle of February I got the kind of phone call that you dread.

It was about 10.45 and I was just about to go to bed when my mobile rang.

The caller ID said it was our allotment secretary and a fellow beekeeper who said 'There's been an arson attack on the allotment - the bee hives are burning!'

 

Any tiredness I might have been feeling disappeared and my wife and I jumped into the car and made our way to the allotment. We live about 10 minutes drive from the plot, and so by the time we got there the fire brigade had already put the fire out.




It turned out that of the seven hives on the apiary, six had been doused in some kind of thinners and one had actually been set alight. The firemen thought that this had probably gone up so quickly that it scared the villain away before they could set fire to the rest.

All that is left of the stand

The hive that had been torched was a complete loss - it had been a poly hive with plastic frames and
so there was nothing left of it at all, just a badly charred stand. The plastic hive which had been next to it had partially melted on one side, but was intact. there is no lighting on the allotment, so we had to scour the whole site using head torches and reflected light from the nearby residential flats for any clues.

There were no signs at the usual points of entry - we had previously piled up spikey branches and wet manure directly under the fence corner where kids had gained access to the site before, and these were undisturbed. The only other easy ways into the site were through the main gate, but that is covered by CCTV (later checks showed that no one had come through that way) or through a gate that leads directly onto the allotment from a neighbouring back garden.


This gate is unfortunately right next to the apiary, and could have been used without the neighbour's knowledge.

It is very unlikely that anyone would have come over our wall and walked past three sheds, two poly tunnels and two greenhouses without causing them any damage just to enter the apiary to burn hives, so this gate seems to be the most likely place the arsonist got onto the plot.

Some charred brood cells in the ashes

The next morning I went back to the allotment to inspect the damage in the daylight - the six hives that had been doused belonged to the other two beekeepers on the site, the only one missed was ours, perhaps because it was on the other side of the apiary and had been missed, or possibly the attack had been targeted against the other two beeks?


We were very concerned about the other hives as petrol fumes are often used as the best way of disposing of a diseased colony and we weren't sure how the colonies would fare. I made a quick call to the Regional Bee Inspector to inform him of what had happened, and he advised us not to open the affected hives until Spring as there was nothing we could do - if the queen had been killed we couldn't replace her so early in the season, but if she hadn't then opening up the boxes in the cold was likely to do more harm than good. We spent the next few weeks on tenterhooks, hoping to see some activity to show whether we had thriving colonies but the weather was too bad for the bees to venture out much.

Orientation flights from our Hive

March came, and we had a couple of days of warmer weather, and to our relief there were signs of life from most of the hives. Bees were seen bringing in pollen into two of the doused hives which is a good sign that the queen has been laying as the pollen is used to feed the growing brood. Our own hive was extremely busy with hundreds of new bees taking to the air on their first orientation flights. It does look as though the majority of the colonies in the apiary have survived this cowardly attack, and we still have no evidence that can point us one way or another.

Lots of activity

The local council sent their allotment officer down when they heard what had happened, and when he saw the unofficial gate next to the apiary he wasn't best pleased, and is in the process of getting it blocked up which should help with security. We are also looking at setting up a trail-cam or even wireless CCTV just in case anything else happens.

A week or so after the incident we set up a donation page for the beekeeper who lost both his hives and at least one full colony - we still don't know about the second. I was completely gobsmacked when, against all my expectations, it reached it's goal of £350 within four days, mainly small donations from complete strangers.  If anyone else wants to contribute, additional funds over the target will be used to go towards providing security on the apiary. Help Fund John's Bees

Events like this shake your faith in human nature at first, only to have it renewed even stronger by the generosity of strangers. Thanks to all who sent messages of support, and to those who donated as well. We won't be beaten by this, and will return even stronger.

Sowing Update

I planted my first batch of seeds on Thursday Feb 26th, and put the broad beans and tomatoes on the windowsill.

I had intended to sow more seeds into the tray with the lettuce and shallots and put them in a sunny place but for one reason or another it was over a week before I did, which meant that most of the lettuce had germinated and was very, very leggy.

Broad Beans doing well

These may not be any good and may need replacing - the good news is that I still have loads of spare seed and the fact that it germinated so quickly is a good sign.

Most of the broad beans have germinated and so I have had to remove the propagator top. The Scarlet Flowered ones lagged behind the Bunyard's Exhibition by about a week, but as I write this on March 11 most are up.



Of the ten varieties of tomato that I sowed, the Green Zebra were very slow to germinate, and only two of the five seeds planted have come up but there is at least two of every other variety apart from the Marmande where only one has shown so far


Again, the top has been taken off the propagator as the plants were touching it.

Leggy lettuce to the left

On March 7th I sowed Red Baron and Kelsae onions, Giant Prague celeriac, Little Gem Lettuce, All Year Round Lettuce and Broccoli Raab into the tray already containing the lettuce and shallots, and this tray was then placed into my unheated conservatory for them to germinate.

Nothing is showing as yet, but it's only been a few days and it is still quite cold in there.

Potatoes and Black Plastic

For all of last year (and a fair bit of the year before as well) I have been fighting an uphill battle against the weeds on my plot, specifically the grass.

I have regularly spent upwards of five hours strimming, raking and clearing the grass only for it to spring back to three feet deep almost overnight.

Last year my time on the plot was mostly limited to Saturdays as I look after my 2 year old grandson Jack on Sundays, so time spent cutting the grass was time I really couldn't afford to lose. I am determined to make be more organised this year, so I have invested in another roll of thick weed fabric and used it to cover the areas on my plot that I haven't managed to get around to as yet. I am hoping that this will effectively smother the majority of the weeds and grass, giving me more hours to spend on the rest.

Purple Sprouting

January King Cabbages under netting

I have covered just under a quarter of my plot with the weed fabric
which will give me some much needed breathing space to get the beds weeded, composted and ready for planting. Despite the new season being upon us, there are still a few crops still in the ground from last year.

I still have four or five purple sprouting broccoli, and about the same
January King cabbages. The leeks from last year are also still looking ok, but I won't know until I pull them if the stems are still firm all the way through.

Last few Parsnips

There are also a few parsnips still waiting to be lifted, but as they store much better in the ground I will be
leaving them there until they are needed for a specific meal.

Leeks nearly ready for harvest

This growing season has well and truly started with garlic and Snowball onion sets being planted into one bed. I don't plant my onions out to over winter as the first time I tried that I lost over 80% of them, so instead I use a modular seed tray and put each bulb into its own section along with some compost and water them in well. Once their leaves have reached 4-6 inches I them transplant them into their final positions in the beds.

I recently went to a Potato Day at the Hulme Community Garden Centre where they had upwards of 40 different varieties of seed potato for sale.

First and Second Earlies

This year I decided to play it safe and went for varieties that I have had before and gotten good results from, plus a couple of new ones. I have gone for six varieties again this year. I chose two First Earlies (Pentland Javelin and Colleen), one Second Early (Bambino), one Early Maincrop (Mary's Rose) and two Maincrops (Sarpo Mira and Pink Fir Apple).

Maincrops

The newcomers amongst all these are Colleen and Mary's Rose. All the potatoes are chitting away in egg boxes in the polytunnel and should be ready for planting by the end of March. In the past I have planted both into the ground and also into buckets with varying success, and this year I have decided that the majority of my potatoes will be planted into buckets, bags and other containers.

This is because I have a limited number of beds for veg, and by taking up three or four of them with potatoes I am really limiting my available planting space for other crops. Also, I can place the buckets on the black weed fabric that I have just set out so I will effectively be utilising more of my plot, and I can space them more widely that I could within a bed as that caused a bit of a problem last time due to the foliage overlapping adjacent pots making it difficult for them to be watered as much as they needed.

The New Season Starts Here

I have spent quite a few hours over the winter trying to decide what to grow on the allotment this coming season.

Like many gardeners, over the last couple of years I have built up a quite impressive collection of different seeds from many places.

Some of these, like the Purple Topped Milan Turnips, will never get planted as neither I nor my wife like them.

Others like Asparagus Pea have been planted once but we didn't like the taste.

Yet more are in the sad situation of being either too far past their use-by date to be worth trying again.

The final lot of seeds destined never to be sown on my allotment are those that are OK, but are not my favoured variety - a good example being the Purple Climbing French Beans that I grew last year.  Perfectly good in their own right, but not as nice on the plate (in my opinion) as Cobra or Blue Lake.

I store my seeds in three large plastic boxes that used to hold mushrooms, and each box is split into three sections.

The seeds are split into the following sections - Brassicas, Herbs, Legumes, Leaf Crops, Cucurbits, Root Crops, Tomatoes and Chillis, Alliums and Others.

After discarding the out-of-date seeds and those that I won't be using for the reasons listed above, I still have over 150 varieties including 20 types of tomato, 11 chilli peppers, 9 lettuce, 6 courgettes and 5 types of cauliflowers including purple and romanescue.

Obviously I won't be able to grow all of these, but until the sowing time arrives I am holding back on choosing one variety over another.

Last summer I had been asked to help judge the local Housing Association Garden competition, and I received £50-worth of garden vouchers as a 'thank you', so I decided to make good use of them and purchase a few propagators and seed trays so that I was able to start my seed sowing tonight.

I chose 10 tomato varieties (last year I didn't get a single tomato, so I am determined to do better this year).  I wanted lots of variety so I planted a couple of cherry tomatoes, a couple of large beefsteak type, some plum (standard and baby) and then some unusual varieties like Green Zebra and Orange Banana.

Broad Beans were fairly easy as I only had two varieties, Crimson Flowering and Bunyard's Exhibition, so I sowed a dozen of each.

Last year I got a few packets from Seeds of Italy which I was very happy with, so I also sowed a few cells with Lettuce Bisca Rossa which had provided us with several nice salads over summer.

I am also trying some shallots from seed this year, the variety is Zebrune, and so I sowed 21 into individual cells.  I normally use sets, but wanted a bit of a challenge this year :)

I have put the mini propagators on the box room windowsill to germinate - hopefully I will start to see some life within the next week.