St Georges Day Digging

It's our (English) patron saint day - we don't celebrate it. I don't think anyone does - apart from putting the England flag up. At least this year some of us got the day off work (well, it is Saturday!)

We spent the afternoon digging. Plot 3 really is hard work. So much grass and roots to dig through. Most of the time it's a hands-and-knees job, rather than just being able to get a fork into the ground :-(

At least it's looking a bit better now. Our pot raspberry is in position, but it's also going to be caged in, to protect the precious fruit from the birds.

Seedlings are popping up in most of the modules in the greenhouse, but too small to be transplanting them yet. I sowed some purple and some yellow mangetout last weekend - no sign of them yet though.

That's the inside of one of the tulips, so pretty (super-macro unfortunately didn't quite get the stigma in focus). They close up at night and I think they'll be quite short-lived.
And here's a bee tucking into the rosemary nectar. A couple more photos (but no id) on the Wildlife blog - http://plot7wildlife.blogspot.com/2016/04/busy-bee.html

Some (Kind of) Welcome Rain

It rained today - unfortunately it started just as we got to the plot after our jam-making session this morning! It was lovely rain though and we had a nice view from inside the greenhouse.

That's the purple-podded mangetout on the right and this is the colour of the water that is drained after they've been cooked for about 3 mins - pretty huh?

During one of the bright spells between the heavy showers I managed to get our 6 Brussels sprouts (Revenge) planted. 4 on Plot 7 and 2 on Plot 3, where we figure the ground is probably harder, so may make for better, tighter sprouts. They're all under netting with a cloche (to protect from wind for the moment) and slug pellets.

Jamie's trying to weed around the raspberries on Plot3 but it's a bit of a nightmare, with couch grass, common figwort and horsetail to name a few of the most prevalent weeds...
We were so pleased to see this new visitor - a male bullfinch and his partner - to the hedgerow while we were hiding in the greenhouse! He'll get a mention on my Wildlife Blog, but is so great looking that he deserves a mention here too!

Not the best photo, but hopefully he'll return

The cucumber in the greenhouse has done just what it was meant to do by climbing through the shelf and clinging on - perfect.

And this was today's harvest (as well as the strawbs). Broad beans and spuds are on the menu for a while :-) We don't freeze our veggies which is why we generally only plant a few of everything. The only preserving we do tends to be pickling and chutneys (and now jam).

There was no rain yesterday (thank goodness) when I helped on the HAHA stall at the Hungerford Primary School fete. It was a really good afternoon with hundreds of people.

Bonnie helping to make paper pots and planting a bean

We made up all of our insect hotels and by the end of the day children were running around trying to find their own sticks and twigs to fill the remaining couple of bottles! We'll definitely be making more bug hotels at future events - it proved very popular.

Zoe & me helping with bug hotels

Flowers Before Food

It's been a warm week with a few millimetres of rain mid-week so everything is growing happily and, with any luck, lots of flowers will soon mean lots to harvest. I've been lunching on fresh salad and beetroot this week, with plenty of strawberries for desserts.
These are our tumbling Lizzano tomatoes which we grow outside - they don't have their side shoots nipped and generally produce an abundance of tomatoes so fingers crossed for this year.

Lizzano Tomato flowers

The tomatoes in the greenhouse (Sungold) don't have any flowers yet, but the sweet pepper has several flowers and one tiny pepper already..

The mangetout (purple-podded) is looking really pretty - people keep thinking its sweetpea, but it's better than that! There are some tiny peapods just beginning to form.

These flowers are on our Tenerife papas...

Looking rather similar to the kestrels...

Not long to wait now for our broad beans. I sprayed them with soapy water a few weeks ago, to kill off the blackfly. I think I put too much Fairy Liquid in the solution and that's why the leaves have gone black. The pods look good and healthy though, just need to fatten up the beans inside a bit more...

For the same meal we'll see if we have any Rosabelle early potatoes under all that foliage!

We've already had some home-grown new potatoes - from Chris, a fellow plotholder. They were Foremost and really were delicious!

We had the AGM on Monday night. Not a massive turnout (it never is) but enough people were there, along with the committee, to make for some interesting debate. A couple of the councillors came along (the mayor, who's a plotholder) and a councillor from Newbury who used to have a plot at Marsh Lane. We're still waiting for decisions regarding the future of Marsh Lane - we won't know until at least September what lease we will have when ours runs out in April 2016 :-(

And lastly, here's our collection of round stones we've found on the site - good aren't they!

Know Your Enemies

I got screeched at by a couple of jackdaws! They weren't happy when I stopped them jumping along behind the frog which was trying to hop away in the long grass - poor froggy was only a little fella. Anyway, he got away safe. I wish the jackdaws would concentrate on slugs and snails, not the good guys!
We did a lot of weeding, tidying and feeding today - our strawberries have had a bit of tomato feed and are now netted as tiny strawberries are just beginning to develop.

This is the site after it's been tidied

Jamie completely dug and weeded the quarter where our parsnips and carrots are going - alongside our onions. I planted my purple-podded mangetout outside. I'm growing them up an obelisk. They're well-protected at present otherwise the pigeons wouldn't be able to resist. I don't intend to leave the bottle cloches on once they've got a bit bigger. I've planted all 11 plants, so the obelisk may get a bit overcrowded if they all survive. I'm hoping I'll be able to get at the pods...I'm guessing the flowers grow on the outside facing the sun so that's where I'm hoping the pods will end up!

I also planted out some of the Little Gem and Tom Thumb lettuce outside. I'm not protecting them as we have plenty, but may have to take action if pigeons, pheasants or slugs step up...

All the Boltardy beetroot are planted out now too - this is a part of allotment life that I love; filling in the gaps with tiny plants and watching them grow into food - hopefully mostly for me and Jamie! They're under cover, but only because they're going to share the small raised bed with Silverskin onions, which should be sowed soon.

Our Tenerife spuds are emerging in the bags! Not showing enough for a photo yet, but tell-tale humps in the soil. They obviously prefer the warmth of the bags more than in the ground at the moment.

And here are our bell pepper and chilli pepper. They've grown a lot since we bought them in Wilko a few weeks ago. They're staying at home for the timebeing...

He's Only Gone and Done It Again!

Jamie that is. He's taken on another plot... well, Plot 3 has recently been given up and the site has quite a few empty so he's doing the site a favour <ahem>. I'm pleased too, the greenhouse is taking up a bit more space than expected so I may need to transfer my courgettes onto Plot 3 too - it's intended to be the pumpkin patch.

Jamie's sprayed Round-Up on the back of the plot to clear some of the couch grass and dug along the hedge-edge to mark the boundary - it's about 2 poles (50m²) and has some raspberry canes and a rhubarb plant already growing on it.
The ground was so dry yesterday that Jamie found it very hard digging but there's been lots of rain today and overnight so we may get to work on it tomorrow.

Look who made themselves at home on our bench while we weren't watching! There are so many pigeons about but luckily the hedgerow and tree buds are mostly keeping them fed at the moment.
Our seedlings are coming along well in the greenhouse. There's life in most of the pots and trays, though still waiting for the Defender courgettes to make a show...

Purple-podded peas

I transplanted some of the thinned lettuce seedlings in the raised bed. I also sowed a few more spring onions and radish - I've been nibbling a few radishes recently, but not enough to make a proper salad yet.

The strawberry plants are covered in flowers. Unfortunately the black centres mean that the flower got frosted so that won't be producing an early fruit for us. Hopefully we'll not get more hard frosts - though we're not safe until June really... :-(

There's no stopping the British potatoes but the Tenerife ones are too afraid to come out from the warm earth yet - hope there is life in them under the ground and in the bags.

I'm looking forward to making some chive flower vinegar again, it is so pretty and nice to have oniony-flavoured vinegar for salad dressing.

Nearly ready...

We've found a few smashed eggs around the site. Look at that pretty little egg. Sadly, that looks to be the egg of a Song Thrush. What a shame! We need them to deal with the slugs and snails. :-(

Broad Bean Damage - The Culprit

I joined Jamie on the allotment in the afternoon and spent most of the time weeding and staring! I was particularly looking at our broad beans which have been nibbled all along the leaf tips, as usual. We've previously blamed ants, pigeons, pheasants, caterpillars, slugs,,,, But now I'm convinced it's caused by Bean Weevils.

The adult causes the leaf damage, which isn't too catastrophic on a reasonable specimen, but can be fatal for the plant if they start nibbling too much when it's small. Also, the bean weevil larvae damage the bean and roots which is why some of our seeds develop poorly and die before they've really got going :-(

Not a great pic, but I hope you can see it's stripes

This document has some good advice, so I hoed all around our plants so they look a bit happier and I gave them a shake to get rid of some of the weevils, but I don't see why they won't make their way back!
This is another of the critters that I thought may be to blame for the broad bean damage - Red Velvet Mites - there are a lot of these around at the moment. But these are actually a friend of the allotment holder. They eat other insects (hopefully weevils, but I'm not sure) and help with decomposition of organic matter.

I was looking round garden centres in the morning (managed to avoid the temptation to buy) while Jamie dug the last potato trench and planted the Tenerife potatoes - a row of 9 on top of manure, pine needles and shredded cardboard. The poor little spuds won't know what hit them - they've probably never been so cold! We had some lovely rain (the first in a couple of weeks) to water them in well in the evening.

We had a few left over so we've planted them in potato bags - two in each bag. We've never grown potatoes in bags before so we're interested in seeing how they'll do. The Rosabelles and Kestrels we planted two weeks ago have just popped out so hopefully they'll have a bit of growing time, with no frost, before we need to do the first earthing up.

I cut a flower stem from one of our rhubarb plants - lots of rhubarb around site has flowered - they are brilliant looking but we don't want ours to bolt and stop producing edible stems yet! I put a pot over the hollow stem where I chopped it off - I've been told that water can get in and rot the plant at the base. Not sure if that's true but it sounds reasonable.

I dissected the flower as they're so mutant-looking! The un-developed flowers are rather interesting up-close too.

Our seedlings are looking ok in the greenhouse with some of the other ones emerging. Still the greenhouse is proving extremely popular with flying insects - the place is literally buzzin' :-)

What do bees and flies talk about??

Composting & Harvesting

A warm reasonably sunny afternoon gave us time to deal with our compost.

Purple-podded mangetout with such pretty flowers

We're moving their position back to where they were year 1 - they hopefully won't mind the hedge/tree roots as much as some of the vegetables do.
The black Dalek bin has been warmly composting all the old cuttings, cardboard and kitchen waste (and a bit of manure) for over a year - close to 18 months.

Straight from the compost bin

Lots of lovely clean, pink little worms, wood lice, millipedes and beetles (mostly devil's coach horses) have been doing a good job breaking down all that organic matter. We roughly riddled it all - through an old fire guard topped with chicken wire - and bagged up the resultant compost.

The end result after riddling

Mmm, so good to feel with your fingertips! We're storing it in the empty bin to keep it nice and warm before we make our new (additional) strawberry bed with these potted-on runners.

Runners still attached to the mother plants

The remaining woody bits, cardboard and eggshells (which we're amazed remained un-rotted) were returned to the other compost bin as brown waste.

Before going home I picked a load of Zephyr squashes and some other veggies for a few meals, plus a few for work colleagues. There's parcel in there too - lovely celery tasting parsley-type herb to add to some potato salad lunches this week.

The mangetout and asparagus peas are so delicious fried in butter!

Patty pans a-plenty!

Festival Squashes

As you can see, the patty pan are going a bit crazy and some Festival squash seem like they may actually come to something - especially if the weather warms up, as forecast. I hate to say it, but we could really do with a few drops of rain! We keep having to water our toms. I've ordered some jar lids so I'll soon be making tomato chutney - hooray!