Someday Soon

Oh, I do love a close-up of a chitting potato at this time of year :-) Here's another for your enjoyment (or at least, for mine) 

Look at those tiny emerging leaves, so cute. Talking of er.. cute... here are some more <ahem> 'babies'.

Lots of teeny tiny snails waiting to emerge from hibernation just in time to breakfast on our seedlings. Pesky things! I hope now they've been revealed that a thrush will find them - over the hedge, where I moved them to!

 

HAHA arranged a manure delivery in the week so lots of people were working on the site at the weekend, even though it was cold. I wheel-barrowed 5 loads to Plot3 - it couldn't be further away from the manure pile, so that was a workout that my lockdown-body isn't used to!

We had a lovely few hours on the plot yesterday. By the time we got there, the sun was just strong enough to burn off the clouds and coats and jumpers were soon removed. Especially as we were digging. I dug a trench where I'm going to try again to grow celeriac.

 

The shredded bills and well-rotted manure will hopefully provide enough water retention to help these thirsty plants to bulb up. We'll see... I know they need A LOT of water. Anyway, first I need to get the seeds to germinate, which I'll do at home as they like to be warm.

 

And Jamie dug the carrot trench. He got the raw deal. There were so many roots in that part of the plot - well, there certainly aren't any roots of stones left in there when he'd finished.

Last week I was eating this really tasty Chestnut and Fennel soup - I topped it with some Seaweed (Kelp) Flavour Boost with either chives or chilli to add a bit of interest.

 

The song title is provided by KT Tunstall. Because, someday soon I'll be making soup with home-grown veg again and sitting on the plot watching things grow... And we'll be out of lockdown (my fingers are crossed).

Making Tracks

These interesting marks are left by a snail (or a slug) that enjoyed eating the red algae that had formed on one of our outdoor storage bins. And while reading about this I also discovered that mollusks have kidneys (as well as most other mammalian organs) - ha, who knew? well, Snail-world.com obviously!

The bargain hibiscus plant that I bought earlier in the year finally flowered - such a pretty shrub! There were 3 buds but two dropped off - possibly eaten :-( Maybe next year there will be a few more...

This was the first of this year's sweetcorn that we shared yesterday - so sweet! After the fretting that they weren't going to cob-up they're doing well - a couple of cobs on each stalk.

Shhh, the magpies don't seem to have found the sweeetcorn under the Jack-Be-Little pumpkin growth so far! But the pumpkin leaves are beginning to die back, so we're having to have a cob each tonight and probably every night..

Look! We've found a second loofah. It's not as big as the other one, but still not sure how we managed to miss it! 

There were large flocks of house martins overhead throughout the afternoon. They weren't sitting on the wires, just flitting and flying around. Amazing numbers and very impressive - clearly miles better than this photo shows, hence the fancy effects! They're preparing to head South, so maybe we'll see them in Tenerife in a few weeks time!

At one point they were joined by a kestrel. We haven't seen one on site all year, so were pleased to see its return - as long as it leaves all our friendly little robins and the wrens alone!

Today was grey but last week we had a sweltering start to the week (when this little cirrus cloud appeared), followed by torrential rain (21mm) and a huge thunderstorm that reached Newbury but just managed to miss Hungerford. I wonder if that marked the end of Summer...?

Hmmm, 400th Post...

 

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 ...

1. 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.
2. Salad, Garlic and Compost. That wasn't a recipe suggestion! It has a nice photo, so maybe that's why it got 184 hits.
3. 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!

Planes, plans and potatoes

We spent a few hours working on the plot this afternoon, it actually got pretty warm. There were lots of fellow plot-holders on site today too so there were plenty of reasons for breaks :-)
We had our own air show while we were on the site. Didn't get any photos but it was great to see the red arrows, 2 spitfires and a hercules. It seems they were flying back from an airshow near Cambridge.

Jamie finished digging out the grass on Plot8. We've decided that we'll put our strawberry bed in there, near the rhubarb - straight across where we were going to move the seating. So the bench can (probably) stay where it is - unless we definitely get another (at least) 4 years on the site in which case I want a pond and then the bench will need to be near that - but that can be decided on next year...

Anyway, where was I? So, the strawberries... we only want 8 plants as we know Geoff's did brilliantly this year and grew big bushy plants which will fill the space we've planned for them. I potted 8 of Geoff's runners - they're still attached to his plants and secured with wire until they've rooted.

We're going to plant them like Geoff's done - on that weed suppressant that you can see in the picture above.

I cut off the tops of the original broad bean plants which have succombed badly to chocolate spot - we leave the roots in the ground to add nutrients to the soil - mainly nitrogen. There's also a chance that we may get a further crop from them, but it's a bit late now really.
We got a whole bagful of dead-heads from the calendula! And riddled a bagful of lovely compost from our green bin which is now half-full of all the broad bean tops - we'll add some cardboard to that tomorrow.

Jamie found these two snails mating. Didn't have the heart to split them up but sent them to do their love-making elsewhere!
We pulled some potatoes, one of each plant:

• Orla - top left. This was one of the few Orla plants which actually survived this year. Disappointing though as there were only 3 reasonable tubers.
• Kestrel - top right. This had quite a few tubers, including a giant but one of the tubers had either slug damage or blight on it. A couple have deep ridges where they've grown against stones, but the potato should be alright for cooking.
• Chopin - bottom. Produced 7 even-sized tubers. The chopins have definitely been my favourites this year. There are a few small holes in some of them but generally they come out of the ground looking lovely and smooth with few blemishes.

We also got some more french beans and the last few broad beans from the original plants - not sure if they'll be edible.

Nice weather for snails (again)

A very quick visit to the plot this afternoon - we just wanted to check that our cloches had stayed on and the little sweetcorn plants were still upright (they are). It's cold (about 15°) and rainy.

All we saw, in the way of wildlife, was a few birds - one pigeon which we freed from a plot holder's netted cloche - and these snails.

Both these were on the thyme flowers

Pretty - brown lipped banded snail

Nice weather for snails

Soooo wet and chilly! We transplanted all the marigolds into the bigger trays and I sowed some calendula and put them all in the cloche.
We mulched around the raspberries with well rotted horse manure from Andy at work and took the bottle cloches off the broad beans which are big enough to look after themselves now.

That was enough - as it was we spent more than half the time in the container just watching the birds and enjoying watching the rain from under cover! It sure is getting a good soaking!