Daddy's Little Helper

Had a quick visit to the plot on Sunday and took one of our cats down with me.

Fred hasn't been too well recently and has lost a lot of weight, so we hoped that by taking him somewhere new it would encourage him to roam, give him a bit of interest and perk up his appetite.

It was also a bit of a test to make sure that he wouldn't run off and get lost as the allotment itself is a few miles from home.

Thankfully he was brilliant - I followed him closely for the first 20 mins or so, but when it became obvious that he was happy to stay fairly close to his water bowl I let him wander by himself.

He is a people cat, so was overjoyed when a couple of other plotters arrived and gave him a bit of attention (probably because I was too busy digging to make a fuss of him)

Fred has a thing about watching work being done - at home, if there is a hole being dug in the road, or a hedge being trimmed you can always find him down the hole with the workmen, or sharing the hedge-trimmers' lunch, so it was no real surprise when I looked up from by work every now and then to see that he was busy supervising Tony who was building a base for his shed.

After an exhausting bit of watching Fred decided it was nap time, and proceded to alternate between sun and shade for the rest of the morning.

His morning out seems to have done him some good as he was packing the food away like there was no tomorrow as soon as we got back home.

I have a feeling that he will become a regular on the plot in future.

First Major Harvest of the Season

So far this year I have been able to harvest a small amout of produce from the garden - there have been a small handful of strawberries and raspberries, a couple of tomatoes, six potatoes, six sticks of rhubarb and a couple of pea pods

With all the sun we have had recently the chard in the front garden has started to bolt and has thrown out huge flower spikes.

Bolting Chard

The flowers themselves are nowhere as colourful as the plant, simply being a mass of tiny green petals.

I decided to harvest some of the plants tonight as we will be making a chick pea and spinach soup tomorrow, using the chard in place of the spinach.

We also had a handful of leaves braised in stock to go with tonight's tea.  I wanted to have a taste test just in case the leaves had become too bitter to use, which is what I have read happens once the plant bolts.

Fortunately they weren't too bad, so there is now a colander full of large leaves plus a nice pile of smaller, hopefully more tender leaves and some stalks - about 350g in total from 2 plants.

There are a further three much larger plants still awaiting harvest - I will probably lift them tomorrow and put something like beets in their place.

Bountiful Harvest

I have planted another Bright Lights Chard at the allotment which is a few weeks behind those in the raised bed at home.

I am hoping to be able to harvest some of the smaller young leaves from that plant on Saturday as well as some of the leef beet we planted last weekend to give Will his first ever produce to take home.

That will be a great milestone for him - the next will be when his seeds start showing, followed by harvesting from the plants he has sown himself.

And then there were six ......

Another long day at the plot again this Saturday - I was on at 6.30am to put the frame together that will eventually hold the netting needed to keep the cabbage whites and pigeons off my brassicas.

A quick check on the plants I had transplanted out earlier this week revealed no slug damage at all to anything - a triumph for slug pellets.



Jack O'Lantern

Both the pumpkins have finally started to put out a vine - the Jack O'Lantern was doing well, but the Mammoth has nearly doubled in size since it was planted out and has what appear to be female fruit forming already.


Mammoth



I may have to pinch these out as they are far too close to the main stem, but I may just wait and see first....

When I planted the courgettes on Thursday evening neither had anything other than leaves, but this morning both have flower buds which I am hoping will open tomorrow.

The French Beans are doing well, with a few flowers and the peas have already got two pods forming.

Hard at work - One of them at least

I went off-site for breakfast about 8am, but was back again for around 10.30am with both step dad Ken and son Will, and we all stayed there until 6pm.

We soon had the frame for the third bed made as all that was missing was the long sides.

Part dug third bed

This bed was installed alongside the existing two and me and Will started to dig it out while Ken continued cutting the rest of the timber to make more beds.

You can see the netting frame that I had made to the left of the picture.


Part way through the afternoon Ken was given some more produce from one of my friendly plot neighbours, Diane, who came across with a handful of beetroot for him.  Thanks again Diane.


 After a lot of hard work we managed to get the final three beds in place, but weren't able to dig them, or even get them properly aligned as we had run out of both time and energy.



 As almost the last act of the day Will planted his first ever seeds - he put in 2 blocks of 9 spinach 'Matador', 2 blocks of 4 x Pak Choi and a single block of Turnip "Purple Milan".  I hope that they germinate and prove to him that he hasn't got 'black thumbs'.

These last sowings have completed the first bed which is now totally full.  Only another five beds to have a go at now.

Week 5 on the allotment - Stuff in the ground - at last

After four weeks of hard work I have finally managed to start transplanting plants from home to the allotment.

It was starting to get pretty desperate as plenty of the seedlings that I have either bought in or started from seed have really outgrown the trays that they were planted in and have started to get root bound.

On Monday night I took a few trays from the blow away down to the allotment and started to plant up into the first bed.


The first planting

 In the picture above you will be able to see that I have marked out squares so we can employ the square foot gardening techniques.

Unfortunately the beds are 4.5 feet by 9.5, so the beds to the right and the top of the picture are 18" wide, but I have taken advantage of this to plant some of the larger, taller brassicas on this side as they won't shade out the smaller crops.

From right to left in the picture above I have planted:

Row 1 - 5 x Brussel Sprouts
Row 2 - 5 x Purple Sprouting Broccoli
Row 3 - 5 x Purple Curly Kale and a square containing 4 x leaf beet
Row 4 - 16 x Winter Onions, four squares containing 16 x All Year Round Lettuce

The two squares of climbers at the top of the bed contain 4 x Blue Lake Climbing French Beans.

One thing I wanted to get out but forgot to bring down were my peas - there is a spare square waiting for them next to the French Beans.

I went back to the plot again last night to finish off the second bed that you can see in the picture, and watered everththing with 1 cup of water per plant.  The lettuce in particular were looking wery worse for wear, but perked up remarkably with the water, so I think I will have to make daily visits to make sure they have enough water until they get their roots deep enough.


Potato Bed

I am also really pleased with the progress of the potatoes.  These were simply supermarket spuds that had been left in the bag too long and had sprouted. 

I stuck them in the ground on Friday July 13th so they will be four weeks old tomorrow.

These are growing so fast it you are actually able to see the difference in size from one day to the next.  I will have to start thinking about earthing them up soon, and I will probably use some of the bought in compost rather than taking from the bed itself.  I had originally made troughs and ridges in this bed and planted into the troughs, but the local foxes trashed the bed on the first night so it is pretty flattened by now, with no spare soil to use.

They were supposed to be there to break up the ground and also to provide some foliage cover to suppress the weeds - if they carry on like this they will certainly provide the cover, and if I do manage to get a crop from them, well then that will be a bonus.

The two pumpkins that I planted straight into the manure pile seem to have got over the transplanting shock and have started to grow again - the Jack O'Lantern is doing best but there are signs that the Mammoth is about to send out a vine - lots of little leaf buds (at least I think that's what they are).

The problem I am now coming up against is one I never expected when I took on a full plot - I am running out of room to plant things in.

The existing bed has 12 squares remaining, but four or five of them are already reserved for Savoy Cabbage - I have a mini competition going with stepdad Ken who is convinced that the bed I made using the no-dig method cannot possibly compete with the bed we double-dug together, so we are going to plant cabbages into both beds at the same time and monitor the results.

The double-dug bed is nearly ready for planting into - I finished filling it last night but I still need to level it and break up any large clumps, and I also need to pull out as much cooch grass root as I can.

There is so much at home waiting to go in that I really don't know how I am going to be able to fit it in, even with another four beds ready to fill the space we rotivated two weekends back.

Plants waiting to go in

There are already loads of plants waiting to go in that I have moved from home, with more Kale, Sprouts, leef beet  and PSB plus cabbage and cauliflower.

We have also been given a little rhubarb plant for when we eventually get the soft fruit area going, plus a couple of comfrey plants - thanks Diane.

All these, and I have still got a blow away at home absolutely full, plus the table in the front garden as well.

Almost ready for planting

We have been very busy at the allotment today.

First I went to our local ASDA to pick up a load of scrap cardboard - the store is 24 hour so they stock the shelves overnight and bin the waste cardboard about 7am, so I called late last night and spoke to the night manager who agreed to put some cardboard to one side for me.

I was there just about 6am to find about twenty pieces of 4' square card waiting for me, and they even helped to carry it to my car too.

At that time there wasn't much point going home so I went straight to the allotment and started to fill one of the raised beds we had made last weekend.

After weeding

I decided to use one of the no-dig methods on this bed, so I quickly raked and forked over the loose topsoil to remove as many of the couch grass roots that I could. 

I managed to get 3/4 of a bucket full from this small area

The bed covered with cardboard.

Once the base of the bed was more or less level I covered it with the cardboard I had got that morning.

This will hopefully keep the weeds in the underlying soil down by denying them any light, but won't stop any plants sending down roots from above.

The cardboard will eventually rot down and add to the compost from the manure, but this will take some time to happen so weeds will be stopped for quite some time I hope



Part Filled with Manure



On top of the cardboard I put about four or five inches of manure, fresh from the rapidly dwindling pile on the road.

If you look at some of the earlier postings you will see that I started piling the manure to the right on my plot, but after looking at the water distribution and drainage Ken has come to the conclusion that this pile needs to move to the left hand side of the plot instead, as the ground it is currently sat upon is probably amongst the best drained on the whole plot. 

Never mind - there is only about five or six tons there already.



Fully Manured



This layer was also raked to get it approximately level, and I also had to make allowances for the uneven surface of the soil below, because once the cardboard becomes wet it will mould itself to the lumps and bumps under it, so any voids would cause subsidence above.

The fully finished bed, ready for planting.

The manure layer should also protect from slugs coming up through the ground- they don't like it as it is too warm and acidic for them. 

It should also burn any weed shoots as they try to grow through it, but won't harm the hardier roots from my plantings.

The final stage was to top the bed with three 70L bags of compost.  ASDA currently have these on offer at £2 per bag - their previous price was 3 for £10.

This gave a top layer of about 3 inches for sowing and planting into. 

I have decided to give this first bed to Will who is going to try Square Foot Gardening as this will be his only bed on the whole plot.

The first bed was completed by 8.30 am due to the minimal digging required, so I set off to pick Ken up who was going to help for the rest of the day.

Ken had different ideas about how to complete the second bed and wanted to make it the traditional way - double digging and incorporating lots of manure as we went.

Our Allotment Secretary had lent me the head off a mattock the night before, so we used the haft from a pick axe and got to work digging the bed down a foot or so.

Bed emptied and levelled 1 foot down

With the right tool for the job this only took a couple of hours to do, with the soil from the bed piles onto wood which we had placed on either side.



We then added six inches of compost from my pile on the roadway, levelled it off and refilled it from the piles either side.



Digging Hoe



I received a new tool in the post yesterday, a digging hoe, which was absolutely the best tool to use to get the big chunks of earth chopped down into little pieces.

By 16.20 we were both totally drained of energy so we decided to call it a day with the bed not quite finished.



Nearly finished bed no. 2

There is probably only another 30 -45 minutes of work left to do to complete it, but it will have to wait for another day.

Once again, the decision to pack up when we did turned out to be a good call as the heavens opened within five minutes of us leaving the plot. 

We had been favoured with good weather all day, with only a hint of a shower around 10.30 and a bit of far-off thunder about 15.30, so we can't complain, especially as the forecast was for lots of heavy showers throughout the day.

Looking forwards to next week now as I can finally get some of the plant in the blow away in the ground.