Roaming Zebra

Sunday ending up being quite a pleasant day, so we managed to get a couple of hours in on the allotment - the first time we’ve got more than a few mins up there for a while. All the rain over the past week has encourage healthy growth of the weeds on the plot… but then everyone seems to be suffering from that quite a bit!

Charlotte potato harvest

Harvested the Charlotte second early spuds - the tops had all died down, and given the weather we thought it would be a good idea to avoid blight! We got a pretty good crop from the eight or so seed potatoes that went in. Some of them towards the one end seem to have been attacked by some type of tiny worm, but mostly a healthy crop! At least a couple of kilos anyway. Hopefully the Pink Fir Apple and King Edwards will be doing just as well for later in the year!

A number of the courgette plants had also produced some rather large fruit again, so I guess some of those will be going to people at work!

Close-up of cut broccoli heads

The second batch of broccoli seems to be coming along nicely - looks like we might actually be around to harvest this crop! Took a couple of heads which were well formed, though there’s a number which will be ready in the next week or so!

The sweetcorn seems to be coming along nicely, its a good couple of feet tall now (seems bigger than most people’s on the allotment site!), and it looks like it might be starting to produce corn, maybe if we’re lucky and get some sun!

All the peas seems to have been eaten by the pigeons whilst trying to grow the first couple of cm above the soil and its a bit late in the year to be sowing now, better protection needed next time I think!

The sturon onions seem to be coming along nicely, though the red baron seem less well. I also harvested most of the shallots, there’s just one variety left in now which probably need a couple more weeks. I planted some of the gizelle shallots at home, but had pretty bad crop failure with those - they seems to have rotted in the last few weeks, and clearly some of the ones at the allotment were going that way as well, so removal was needed. I did get a pretty good crop of shallots, though none are particularly big.

In the spaces where the spuds and shallots came out from, I’ve already done some replanting - on Saturday we had to go to Telford to DHL International to collect a parcel, so we came back via Bridgnorth. One of the stalls on the market there was selling plug-plants of cut-and-come-again lettuce and wild rocket for a couple of quid each, so we thought it worth a punt along with a butternut squash plant… no doubt the slugs will have a go at them, but hopefully there’ll be some left for us!

And finally, I ordered some stuff from Suttons this week - 2nd main crop potatoes, which should be ready September - December as well as some over-winter varieties of onion which should be ready July next year. Last of all, I upgraded WordPress to 2.6 this morning, and it seems to have some changes to image handling, mostly for the better I think, though I’ll have to see how the post formats in the end!