Hungerford allotment blog - grow your own, harvesting and vegetarian cooking. Enjoying allotment wildlife, weather and other things that catch my attention.
Enjoying time on the Marsh Lane Allotment site in Hungerford, Berkshire.
A record of successes, failures and a handy reminder for me.
From 2017 each post title brings a song to add a little extra music to the world - enjoy!
We had another picnicker join us on Sunday. The draw of the chimnea’s heat was too good to miss for the allotment cat. He was happy sitting on the bench with Ivan and me, but then Linda stood up and she lost her seat, which happened to be slightly closer to the fire 😀 What we discovered, as we cleared up for the evening, was that he’d killed a rat just behind us! At least he didn't plonk it down in front of us and put us off our cheese and wine. Last weekend we enjoyed roasted (charred) chestnuts which Ivan had foraged - delish!
We’ve finally had a few dry days though the weather has been extremely dull; we’ve been living in a cloud for at least a week. But it’s mild and I’ve only just picked the last of our outdoor tomatoes!
The tomatoes have been included in most of our lunches and were part of this delicious halloumi meal, with garlic, cavolo nero and peppers from the plot.
We've been able to clear some areas of the plots because it's been dry. I cleared up the radishes and bean plants which were surrounding the chard. And I found one borlotti bean plant - trailing along the ground 😅 I knew I'd sown some seeds somewhere and that explains why I had dwarf plants growing 'up' the tunnel 😏 I've saved some bean pods for drying but not sure if they'll be suitable for storage as they've got so wet. The yellow pods are Yin Yang beans.
The main reason for writing this post is to record that we've sown our broad beans Aquadulce. As usual they have their little cloche covers to offer some protection from mice/squirrels and maybe weather. They're planted into the soil below the mulch and, all being well, will be harvested next April/May.
The purple sprouting brocolli and brussels sprouts are the only other thing (apart from weeds) growing on that plot now. The PSB isn't looking too great but, dare I say, the little sprouts are looking pretty good...
I've completely filled our three dalek composters, but there are masses of worms, slugs and other beasties to help it degrade quite quickly. This is a Leopard Slug - amazing pattern - a good guy who deals with compost and also deals with other slugs...
On that note, I need to start work. Halloween provided us with a little celebration and the plot now has two pumpkin heads on sticks - perhaps the squirrels will get to them, but they should be out of reach of the hedgehog. Apparently pumpkins aren't good for them.
But now it's November and The Gorrilaz provide the title song.
With a few days off last week I was lucky enough for them to be the sunniest we’ve had in a while. We had a barbecue at the plot. The sunshine ripened up some of our tomatoes before blight got them. Not many, but happy to have had some!
The peppers are still green and we may not get any if the slugs have their way. Each visit to the plot we check the plants and invariable another healthy looking pepper has been ruined by slug or snail damage…and sometimes we catch them in the act 😖
Eurgh, so many slugs and they’re so big!! We don’t help ourselves really, with so many hiding places on our plots. At least we’ve finally cleared a rotten raised bed that was sheltering at least 15 big orange slugs and Jamie dug through the area. There, that looks better. Our broad beans will over-Winter there.
At least most of the beans are avoiding damage and runners or french beans are part of most meals at the moment.
And there’s plenty more to make a proper meal these days.
That green squash is a tromboncino. One of the plants has produced these green fruits. The flesh is slightly more yellow than the usual light green fruits; the taste is the same, pretty bland. Quite a few of the fruits are really long but are rotting at the flower end and aren’t forming the bulbous seed end; seemingly because they haven’t been pollinated.
Our carrots wouldn’t be winning any prizes in the Horticultural Show on 18th September! Sadly we won’t be joining in this year due to my shielding from COVID-19 but at least it means we don’t have to worry about “Don’t eat that! Keep it for the show” 😄
We’ve pulled our first Kestrel potato plant. They seem to have escaped slug damage too, which is quite unusual for our potato harvests.
The song title is specifically chosen for Neal who requested some Jethro Tull. As he won the ‘HAHA Tallest sunflower’ competition last week and he insists on using imperial (10ft 3 inches) rather than metric (3.12 metres) I opted for this song title.
😄 Well done Neal! This song will be with you for days!
I've had a few days off work to celebrate Jamie's birthday. We've had a little rain and some sunshine. It's been good gardening weather for the last couple of days.
The Love in the Mist (Nigella) has burst into bloom - such elaborate flowers and they're everywhere. So beautiful.
Unfortunately most of the poppies and Californian poppies have taken over a section of Plot7 where I need to grow veg, so I'm digging them up - it feels so wrong. Most of these will be going into the green bin at home, though I'm sure they'll be back as they self-seed everywhere.
I've attempted to pot on some of them, but I'm not sure they'll work - well, at least they stand some chance...
We've planted out our Benchmaster Runner Beans, it's so windy at the moment that we've protected them with a fleece wall.
The Pickwick Dwarf Runners are also planted out and protected under fleece for tonight (not because we think a frost is coming, but it's their first time out of the polytunnel). I need to put something up so that they don't get snapped by the wind too - we've never grown dwarf runners, but we know that the dwarf french beans are easily snapped.
We've sowed our courgettes into pots to germinate at home along with the Yard Long Beans. So far, 4 of the 9 Gigantes beans have germinated - I hope to get a few more than that to plant up against the canes along with the Yard Longs.
The birds have been pinching our strawberries as soon as they go vaguely pink, so Jamie has netted them up.
But in the meantime Ivan has given us a lovely punnet of strawberries today and they're going home along with our first broad beans - these are from our over-wintered ones, which survived being squashed by snow surprisingly well. Thank goodnesss - we didn't get any broad beans last year and they really are one of our favourite home-grown harvests.
Blackfly are beginning to be a problem, so Jamie has sprayed some of the
plants and you can see in some of these photos that slug pellets have
also made an appearance - we protect the other wildlife from these by
netting any pelleted areas.We don't want any of the robins, magpies, crow, greenfinch or the frogs to eat anything dodgy.
Our shallots are still producing flowers, which get plucked off every time we spot them - annoying. I don't remember having this problem before.
Liz gave me a Lovage plant. It's a herb and apparently it grows huge (over 6-foot) and every part of the plant can be used as a celery substitute - sounds good!
So, things are progressing quite nicely. Just a bit more rain required (night-time only please!) and a couple more days off to hopefully get a bit more clearing done....
The song title by Coldplay is, obviously because of the strawberries - we hope to eat a few of our own quite soon, otherwise well, there's always rhubarb!!
A lovely sunny afternoon on the plot yesterday. It wasn't a quick visit, but this is a quick blogpost. Apart
from weeding and hoeing I sowed some radish (black ones) and turnip (Atlanta) in the little
raised bed on Plot3. It's next to the curry plant, which has such an amazing smell! I think we shouldn't have let it flower, but look how
pretty the buds are. I made this timelapse using Lapse-It on my phone. Just watch the clouds and get lost for a minute....
We planted out calendula and marigolds. The poor plants were all rather pot-bound, but they should recover, although they may not be as bushy as the plants that were planted a couple of weeks ago. I cleared some of the enormous fallen stems from the rhubarb - a real haven for slugs! Right beside our strawberries.
But are these the slugs that do the damage? I'm not sure. These are more interested in decomposing matter, according to the DEFRA slug site - where they mention the UK's largest slug....25cm long - Aaarrgh, lucky it's a woodland slug so we shouldn't stumble across that on the allotment!!
We forgot to put our Flag of Europe up to show our support before the referendum, and now, I'm VERY sorry to say, I don't feel like we are part of Europe. The cloudy skies behind certainly a sign of something brewing...
The sad photo includes the marigolds in a small trough that I put by the allotment gate. They were eaten down to stalks within a couple of days - what a year! Our pots at home are going through the same slug-abuse, but I'm pleased with my Night Sky petunias (even though Beechgrove Garden poo-pooed them recently!).
Thunder was rumbling around us while we got on with various jobs on the plots. And heavy rain showers were interspersed with bright, warm sunshine.
We weeded, sowed a few seeds (mangetout, to make up the current weak show), transplanted some lettuce, planted another Disco Summer squash, fed the birds and Jamie made up the pots for the Rocky cucumbers.
I re-sowed some Eskimo carrots as only two germinated from the previous sowing, but the Primo look quite good.
And then there was a flash of lightning and the loudest thunder clap that I've EVER heard, so we went home!
It's that time again, preparing the way for a slug free Summer - yeah, right! Well, we do what we can and we use Nemaslug. It's been reasonably successful over the last couple of years and has mostly gone in the patch where our potatoes will be going on Plot3. The ground is very wet on that plot - we're a bit concerned that our spuds will rot before they get a chance to grow. The area is covered with plastic at the moment so, even though it's going to be a rainy week, hopefully the ground won't get any wetter... (hmm, not sure it really works that way, but...)
This is the raised bed for salad and florence fennel. We watered in the nematodes and then watered some more, to help wash them further into the soil, and then covered the bed in black plastic. That should warm the earth up nicely and protect the nematodes from the sunlight.
And there's our beetroot - just peeping through! Only a few seeds have germinated so far, but (touch wood) I've never known beetroot to fail. If it does I'll sow some more; it's pretty fast growing.
We copied fellow plotholder, Vic's idea of putting pots in between the strawberry plants for watering. The plants get so bushy that we find the water (and plant food) often just runs down the outside of the weed suppressant. Each of our strawberry plants got a dose of GrowMore yesterday and a dose of nematodes today - what could be worse than sluggy strawberries?!
That's the plot that I weeded yesterday. The earth looks nice and dark because I've spread the remains of last year's grow bags and potato bags to the area. It hasn't been dug in yet as there are liable to be quite a few weeds and baby tomato plants growing in there before we're ready to plant.
Look at that healthy looking broad bean seedling. We've sowed 24 and we're just waiting for 3 slow ones to break through the surface now. When they're a little bigger we'll plant them out.
This is what we're waiting for now - lovely rhubarb. Nearly there, those stems just need to grow a bit more - a couple of weeks I reckon...
Don't worry, I'm not talking about the bloomin' election media! I've had quite enough of that! But here are our two huge rhubarb plants providing us with our first food from the allotment this year (not counting salad and herbs).
I 'lomo-ish'ed the photo in Picasa
The slugs and snails have discovered our greenhouse. A snail nibbled three of the gherkin seedlings - he got winged over the hedge! I'll be re-sowing the remaining seeds soon.
Adding slug pellets too late
As you can see, I'm not risking my lovely little Florence fennel seedlings and have put slug pellets in the trays.
I also put slug pellets in the raised bed around the salad crops yesterday because I saw a few leaves had been eaten. Today I found about 10 dead slugs and snails :-( Not nice. At least they're leaving some seedlings alone at the moment...these are Cornells Bush Delicata squash
and beets.
The beetroot really ought to be planted out this weekend, but I'll transplant the squashes into larger pots and let them grow on in the greenhouse for a while yet.
We cut the grass and cleared some of the edges as that's where the slugs and snails love to hide - that is the trouble with having grassed paths, although they do look good.
It's a milestone, so allow me a little time to reminisce...
Our lovely Marsh Lane site opened in April 2009 and I wanted to record our allotment progress. I much prefer electronic records for ease of searching so posted updates on our personal website - but after
2-and-a-bit years I found it too annoying to update and needed
an alternative and discovered blogging!
Day 1 of the site
I opted for Blogger, can't remember why, but it's free and offered Picasa for photo storage so suits my needs. My first post was on 12th June 2011 - what a dull post that was...Not even one photo!
Moving swiftly on...
Blogger offers stats, I'm not sure how accurate they are because of robots but I find it quite interesting. These are apparently my top 3 posts ...
Fungus Gnats! Well, I'm assuming the title is an oft-searched phrase (523 hits!), not all that catchy or interesting though to be honest.
Salad, Garlic and Compost. That wasn't a recipe suggestion! It has a nice photo, so maybe that's why it got 184 hits.
French Bean Chutney. Well, that is a recipe and a lovely one so I can see the appeal there for 158 visits.
Well, that's enough of that, back to today...
It was a very windy day, with quite a lot of rain. It wasn't a day for
spending much time at the allotment but we did what we intended to do,
we got this year's nematodes on the go.
Now, as you know, we don't like killing things, but these slugs are
taking liberties! So, nemaslugs strike again - in our potato plot, our carrot plot and in the raised bed where my fennel and salad are
going.
(as long as you don't consider slugs as wildlife...)
They needed to be well watered in and they got that! The ground temperature needs to stay above 5° otherwise the nematodes will die so hopefully this is timed right - not that they'd keep in the fridge any longer anyway.
And now it's British Summer Time! Hooray, lighter evenings so we can go to the plot after work!
