Allotment Countdown T-3

Only three more sleeps until I find out if I have got my allotment.

All my spare time is now spent in either reading my books on allotment gardening or searching the web, specifically for advice on how to tackle an overgrown allotment.

The plan has developed a little over the past few days.

Step 1.  Strim the entire plot and pile all the cuttings at the back intermingled with cardboard and shredded paper to try and stop the pile going slimy and horrible.  I have been offered the loan of a battery powered strimmer, and there is a petrol one I can hire at the allotment for £10 per day.  My son Will has promised to give me a hand with it, so we should hopefully be able to get it all done in a single day, weather permitting.

 

Having said that, the long range forecast is for some showers on Sunday, but not too bad on Monday with a chance of rain around midday, so we may leave the main work for Monday.

 

Step 2.  Dig two 4' x 8' beds - where these are sited will depend upon the condition of the ground as we uncover it, and also if we uncover any plants in situe - apparently there is some rhubarb in there somewhere.

Step 3.  Cover the majority of the rest of the plot with black polythene - I will visit our local builder's merchant and purchase a couple of big rolls that I can use until I can get hold of some proper weed suppressing fabric,  I'm not going to order anything until I am sure that I have got the plot.

Step 4.  Stick a load of potatoes into the ground that is not covered by plastic.  Hopefully this will help to break up the ground a bit and also provide som e foliage cover to keep the weeds down a bit.  If I get any crop from them then that will be a bonus, seeing as I wil be using a couple of bags of ASDA whites that have started to sprout in the veg drawer at home.

Step 5.  Plant up the newly dug beds with a mixture of young plants from the blow away at home and seeds planted straight into the ground.  I am going to use the square foot gardening method on at least one of these beds, but I am not planning on using wooden framing to start as I think that will give the slugs and snails a place to hide through the day.

I know that things are unlikely to work out quite like this, but at least the plan is there.

Wish me luck - I think I am going to need it!

Allotment Countdown. T-6

There are now only six days until I get my allotment, so I have been working hard to try and get sone seedlings ready for transplanting as soon as I get a couple of beds ready.

Got some more veg plugs from Aldi today - I got Brussel Sprouts and purple Curly Kale, and I also picked up a tray of strawberries as I needed five more plants to fill up my hanging planter..

I have also sown nine modules of lettuce, All Year Round, and I have tried an experiment with the water retaining gel that came with the Aldi veg plugs by replacing the compost and sowing a couple of spinach seeds into each cell.

I also picked up an olive and a fig from Lidl.  The olive was in reasonable condition, but I don't think that the fig is going to survive long at all.  Still, I will give it a chance.

These won't be going to the allotment as they need to be brought in over winter.

Multi Onions per plug

After having transplanted all the veg plugs my blow away is absolutely full - I ended up with 59 onions as each plug had up to six separate seedlings - after asking for advice on The Grapevine I decided to carefully split them and give each one its own separate cell.



A very full blow away

 We have finally had a bit of sun, inbetween the torrential rain and hail, and this seems to have given everything a bit of a kick start.

Lettuce by the front door

The cut-and-come-again lettuce by the front door is looking great and we have already had three or four meals from it.  I am hoping that it will last long enough for me to get some lettuce grown down at the allotment.  I cheated a bit with this lettuce - I noticed a pack of 'living lettuce' in the reduced section at Asda marked down to 20p, so I bought it and carefully split it into eight sectios, each with a well defined root system, and planted them in a large tub.  Three weeks later they had almost filled the tub and we were popping out for some lettuce whenever we needed some.  I think I will give that a try again next year.

The tomatoes in the growbag at the front of the house look like they are finally starting to develop some flowers.

The thyme has almost doubled in size over the past week which is really good as it is the herb we use most in the kitchen.

A couple more kohl rabi have germinated along with two Sweet Baby tomato and two Oregon Sugar Pod mange tout  on the boxroom windowsil.

Still nothing from the Borlitti, Mammoth pumpkin or Anaheim chillis but it has only been six days.

I was expecting these to germinate faster than those outdoors - the Mammoth pumpkin in the blow away took 10 days to finally show - it will be interesting to see how long the one inside takes.


I have also decided it is time to plant out my aubergine and a couple of the peppers, so I balanced a grow bag on some greenhouse staging to keep the plants away from the slugs and snails.  I already have one pepper forming, and both plants look like they are about to produce a few more flowers.



Two Peppers flanking the Aubergine in the GrowBag



Not sure about the aubergine - it is going strong, but I can't make up my mind if it is about to flower or just produce more leaves

More seeds

Sowed a load of seeds yesterday ready to be transplanted to the allotment as soon as I have a bed ready for them, which I am hoping will be around my birthday on July 10.

I put in loads of cucurbits (courgette family) as last year I put them in late, and although some small fruit formed almost all rotted from the flower end before they were big enough to pick.


I planted 3 x Courgette 'De Nice A Fruit Rond' (never had a round courgette before so really hoping these come up),  4 x Squash 'Patty Pan Custard White', 3 x Courgette 'All Green Bush', 3 x Courgette 'F1 Defender' and 3 x Courgette 'F1 Atena'

I had a few spaces left so I decided to try some Kohl Rabi 'Purple Vienna' - another veggie I have never grown, or even eaten for that matter.  I sowed three or four seeds in each 'plug' just in case some didn't germinate.



What I planted today.



I also planted out a couple of spare plants to replace the slug and snail eaten ones - a couple of Romanesque broccoli and a Cavolo Nero kale.  All my brassicas are now protected by pop bottle cloches.

I don't want to lose any more seedlings so the cloches will stay on until the plant is too big for them and hopefully big enough to survive the odd leaf being munched,

Fully loaded Blow Away

Had a quick look at the seeds I planted 10 days ago - no signs of anything from either of the pumpkins or the spring onions, but a couple of the Kelvedon Wonder peas are showing, and there is even a tiny bit of green from one of the Paris Market carrots.

One of the pepper plants in the blow away has got a flower on it.  Apparently they self-pollenate, so I may have at least one fruit this year.

Flowering Pepper

Also in the blow away is my single aubergine plant which is getting quite tall now, and looks like it has recovered from the slug attack a couple of weeks back.  Apart from the pumpkins I think that this is the plant I am most looking forwards to see growing.

Aubergine - Recovered after slug attack

Maybe I can do this gardening stuff after all!

One new thing I tried yesterday was to mulch round the leeks in my raised bed with grass clipplings.  It is supposed to keep water in the soil - not that we have had any problems with shortage of water recently! and also to deter slugs and snails as it dries and becomes a barrier.

Part-mulched raised bed

We will see.

New Sowings

With the hope of the allotment looming close I suddenly realised that once I have managed to clear the plot (or perhaps just part of it) I have nothing ready to plant.

Rather than waiting until early July to get started I decided to use my blowaway to propogate some seedlings that I will be able to transplant once I have space cleared.

I chose to plant the following :

Peas - Kelvedon Wonder
Spring Onion - White Lisbon,
Carrot - Paris Market
Basil - Minette
Pumpkin - Jack o' Lantern
Pumpkin - Mammoth

I planted plenty of the first four, but only one each of the pumpkins because if they germinate they will need a huge amount of space, and I want to grow more than a single plant to a bed this year.

Ninja slugs??

I knew it was too soon to celebrate geting rid of the slugs and snails in the garden.

I had been out collecting slugs and snails the night before as usual, and struggled to find any at all, even when carefully folding back leaves to check, and looking down the back of the potato sack that is next to the fence where I can usually find a few nice specimens to be given enforced swiming lessons in a bucket of salty water.

I went out the next morning to do my usual round of the beds before work to find that two of my romanescue broccoli had been munched, one almost completely, along with a large part of the foliage in one of my potato bags and odd bits of the kale.



 

                              

Munched!!






I even found a giant snail on the inside of the door to my blow-away greenhouse where it had nearly reached the peppers and aubergine on the top shelf - at least my plan of putting them high up has prevented them coming to more harm.

I am at a loss as to where these have come from - for the past couple of weeks I have been patrolling the garden at dusk and after every shower to collect and kill any snail and slug I can see - the death count must be in the high hundreds by now.

When I started harvesting them I was getting some really impressive specimens up to six inches long, but recently I have been hard pressed to find anything over an inch, but suddenly all the big boys are back, and they are hungry!  They must be Ninja Slugs - hiding until I have gone past then leaping out onto my brassicas.



Looking on line as to how other gardeners control their slug population I came across a product called Nemaslug, which is a naturally occurring microscopic worm which infects the slug, causing it to bury itself and die. You get a pack of inert powder that contains millions of these worms which you mix with water and simply water the entire garden with it  These things then actually go looking for the slugs in the soil, which appealed to my sense of justice - if the slugs and snails go looking for my veggies then why should I not have a small army of microscopic worms on my side to do the same to them.

I promptly ordered a pack big enough to cover 40 square metres - my front garden just happens to be about 35 square metres so I will even have enough left to treat around the blowaway in the back too, if I am careful.

The product wasn't cheap - including postage it was just over a tenner, but as it is supposed to give six weeks protection per application I think that will be a reasonable outlay for no more eaten seedlings

Pop  Bottle Mini Cloches

As a short-term measure I have used 2L pop bottles as improvised cloches to protect the remaining obviously tasty romanescues - I have also cloched up the casualties, just in case they survive.

If they don't, I have a couple of spare plants in the blow-away to replace them.

The Nemaslug arrived on Saturday, but I didn't have time to apply it then so it looks like that will be a job for today.  I never thought I would be involved in biological warfare, but needs must.  At least it is totally natural, which makes me feel a bit better about it all.

On a happier note, it looks like I may get some apples on my dwarf trees this year.  Both trees flowered well, and it looks like there are signs of the fruit starting to swell.  Not sure what to call the bit that is swelling, I shall have to look it up later, unless anyoone out there knows what it is?

One plant had loads of flowers, but it looks like very few have set, whilst the other variety only had about half a dozen but virtually all have set.  I left pollination to the bees again this year, but next I think I will have to try some manual pollination with a small paintbrush to see if I can improve the setting rate.

The dwarf pear, however, still hasn't even had a single flower, and not even any signs of trying to.

Never mind - time to go and rain some watery death from the skies on my slugs,