Roaming Zebra

Finally managed to get the potatoes in at the plot – they’ve been chitting in the house for sometime now and I’ve been meaning to get them in the ground for a while.

Dug trenches and planted at the bottom of them with just a bit of earth on top. Added in B&Q potatoe fertiliser as well as some chicken manure pellets to keep them fed. We’ve got two varieties in, first earlies (Pentland Javelin), which are supposed to be somewhat eel-worm resistant and should be out before blight becomes a problem.

The maincrop is desiree which isn’t resistant to anything as far as I know. So we’ll have to see how things go.

Did a quite count of onion sets:

• 104 red
• 57 first left bed (winter)
• 23 shallot giselle
• 28 far right (winter)
• 28 lower middle left (winter)

There are a number of gaps – need to fill them with some new sets.

Kale & broccoli potted on as well as Balconi tomatoes that hadn’t been done yet.

Second sowing of Bounty sweetcorn due to low germination rate from first sowing. We suspect this might have been down to compost that was too wet – we’ve found that the peat based seed compost often stays very wet.

Bought a pile of pressure treated timber from Wickes to build some new anti-bird and anti-fly cages for the allotment. Rebuilt the cage for the brassicas to stop the pigeons getting at them (learnt the hard way last year!).

Also built a smaller cage using scaffold net to see if it works at stopping allium fly from attacking the leeks – last year a number of our leeks and a lot of the others on the site got attacked by some sort of allium fly … maybe its the one that has been featured on Gardener’s World as not hot in the Midlands?

Also built a triangular cage covered in fleece to protect the carrots (autumn king 2) from carrotflt attacks.

Built a compost heap from pallets collected from work and the timber that our greenhouse glass came in. Also had some timber from building concrete base for the greenhouse and shed, so that got used for making up the gaps in the pallets. So we now have a two-bay compost bin.

Planted a couple of rows of Twinkle peas and Palace parsnips. Last year I lost the parsnips, so these are clearly marked this year. Put some bottle tops over the peas to protect the shoots from birds when (if!) they germinate.

Back at home, planted sunflowers (3 per pot, varioious varieties) and dahlia seeds in a tray. These will get transplanted to the plot when they are big enough. We’re also planning on adding some drift sunflowers to the plot later in the year if I ever get the planned area cleared.

Finished mulching the garden at home today – added more coco shells on the small top-left bed. Added a couple of bags of pine chippings to the lower right beds. Hopefully the cats won’t like the mulch surfaces too much …

The garden is actually looking quite tidy at the moment! – If you ignore the long, narrow side bed which was supposed to have wild-flowers, but is currently full of daffodils!

Got a chance to sow a load 0f seeds this evening (yoga pregnancy evening so I was home on my own for a while).

Under a glass sheet (spare bit from the greenhouse!):

• catmint
• sweetcorn lark
• courgette parthenon
• Zucchino Tonda di Toscana (2 per pot)

Half trays:

• Sonette lettuce
• Jeffereson Iceberg
• Little Gem lettuce
• Cos lettuce

And then a few other bits

• Climbing French Bean
• Hungarian Wax Chili (for picking in 2010!)
• Pumpkin Mars
• Pea Twinkle (in pots for a trial)

Spent some time clearing cooch grass at home from the front rockery … it seems to be the only thing that grows well in the solid clay there – maybe we should just leave it in!

Potted on calabrese, red peppers and Balconi yellow tomatoes

Was only permitted a short time on the plot today

And under duress as well!

Anyway, planted out some calabrese plugs which have been waiting around since being bought to go out. Netted to keep the birds off them.

Found some Leek Musselbrugh and Carrot early nantes seed tape from last year, so I popped them out for a try. Will need to build something using scaffold net to see if we can keep various flies away from the crops.

Unfurled a huge black plastic sheet bought from allplas. It covers the large section at the bottom of the plot that really, really needs a good clearing and tidy up. Its where all the random cooch grass and junk has been being piled to rot down. We really need to build a proper compost heap (got some pallets, just not enough yet) for the crap to go in.

Having unfurled the sheet, I think we need some more bricks up at the plot to hold it down.

Broadcast planted some Maestro carrots in the big green tub.

And back at home …

Had a general tidy of the garden and weeded the top left bed nearest the house. Mulched the bed with a bag of coco shells which was left over from last season. It was all quite wet and squidgy, but it should for a good mulch.

Had a good weed of the bottom right bed, removing several trugs worth of cooch grass – its all going in the green wheely bin for the council to compost though – definitely not putting cooch grass in our compost bin at home!

Removed a lot of the other plants which are smothering or tend to smother the whole bed.

Mowed the lawn to avoid too much trouble!

The kale has started to sprout!

It rainied soooooo much on Saturday that we didn’t see the point in going to the plot on Sunday – the soil will be just solid clay wetness and impossible to dig.

There was a Gardeners World special on Friday night on peat and compost. With mention to peat-free alternatives. New Horizon grow bags have been tested to be the best peat-free product for growing seedlings. Will have to see if we can find any in the local stores.

The local B&Q didn’t have any, but it did have the highly rated Westland peat-free product so we bought a bag of that to try it out.

As there was no allotment trip, cleaned the greenhouse and trays (at last!).

Sowed a load of seeds, on a window sill inside the house:

• Tasty red peppers
• Meek and Mild chilis
• Jalapenos
• Tomato moneymaker

And in the greenhouse

• Onion squash
• Comfrey
• Celery monarch
• Redbor Kale
• Broccoli
• Sweetcorn – Bounty & Swift

Moved some red peppers from the windowsill into the greenhouse.

Where are our courgette seeds? All the seeds are packed into monthly sowings, but I can’t find the courgettes!

Today was the first time the lawn at home has been mowed. The cats have been crapping in as usual. Its always a problem when it gets too long!

I also got to go on a trip to the tip taking cardboard for recycling and just general accumulated junk from around the garden.

Soo much stuff to do that I only got chance to drop stuff atthe plot – 4 bags of home-brewed compost from the bin at home (two years worth!). Not sure where to spread it, but its quite a nice vintage compost now though!

Most of my allotment time recently has been spent clearing the weeds and digging the soil.

My dad popped up last weekend and spent several hours with me digging up at the plot. This meant we got some quite large areas of the plot cleared and forked over. I still need to run over these bits with the soil miller, but it should have dried out a bit and should hopefully be easyish to mill. Going to try and get a bit of time in there on Saturday to finish pre ping the soil for planting.

There’s still a large bit in the middle with couch grass, but I think I’ll save that for a bit later – I’d like to get some things into the bits that are already clear first!

At the very bottom of the plot, the weeds are getting a bit out of hand, so I think a purchase of some large, black plastic sheeting is needed to keep them down for the time being.

Certainly helpful having an extra pair of hands!

Well, we ventured up to the plot on Saturday for the first time in a long while … it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might have been!

The soil is pretty wet at the moment, no big surprise there though given its clay and has been raining a bit recently. Though the bits that got well dug over last year and milled with my Wolf Soil Miller are actually in quite good condition. Applied some lime to bits of this and some compressed chicken manure fertiliser which then got dug in. I think lime is supposed to be applied late autumn really, but it should be fine and I’m sure we’ve got a few frosts yet!

Cut down the raspberry canes to ground level, the should be dormant by now … need to have a good weed in-between them before they grow up again for this year. Also weeded amongst the winter onions and shallots that went in late autumn. Looks like maybe the pigeons have been pulling some out as there are a few gaps.

Trip to both Wilkinson and Ashwood on Sunday to purchase various bits – Wilko for seed trays, some seed potatoes and red-onion set. Ashwood for compost and a few other bits and pieces … luckily it wasn’t one of their Hellibore weekends (they start next weekend, 31st Jan) so it was quite quiet there.

Incidentally, from last year’s crop, we were a little disappointed to find that the leeks we grew had been infested with some sort of larvae, probably some fly that goes for the allium family. When I did some googling late last year, there was some suggestion that a particular fly lays its eggs in August/September time, so I think some sort of fine netting will be needed this year!

Allotment Picked Raspberries

Its been a while since I’ve posted anything on here. Mostly because I haven’t really had a lot of time, and I haven’t had much allotment news to post!

We’ve done a varying amount of harvesting, often ending up with some huge courgettes which we have no idea what to do with (some of the biggest have been going straight onto the compost heap!)…

We’ve now dug up all the remaining spuds, which have had varying success – there’s been quite a lot with little slug holes in (in the King Edward at any rate). Maybe some sort of nematode will be needed next year to help stop that! Have planted up my Maris Peer Christmas potatoes, which are coming through nicely now, though a couple have leaves which have died off – not sure if that is a bit of blight got them (they are very low ground level at the moment), or if its lack of water or maybe just wrong conditions. Anyway, I cut the leaves off and disposed of them…. think I’ll earth the plants up to help discourage blight for the next week or so!

The raspberries have done really well, which is good as we didn’t plant them on the plot and the previous plot holder apparently removed them all! As a bonus, the birds don’t seem to have gone for them!

Still not picked any of the sweetcorn, though I think some of it may now be ready for trying… The mini-tomato plants at the allotment seem to have produced a lot of fruit, though it seems to be bursting as it ripens. At first I thought it might have been birds, pecking them, but after netting the fruit, its still happening.

The bottom of the plot seems to have been invaded by weeds again and I spent a while last night pulling some of the worst ones out and getting rid of them.

Back at the greenhouse we’ve got another couple of melons set in the greenhouse – the first one to set seems to have stopped growing, not sure if that was a lack of water, or the weather went dull and cloudy and wet for a while. I’ve just got the first of my greenhouse tomatoes starting to ripen, I suspect general wet and cloudyness has contributed to the late starting to ripen of the plants.

Blackcurrants (Image Wikimedia Commons)

Last night was spent making up some blackcurrant sorbet as well as preparing to make blackcurrant jelly…

One of the other allotment holders has a number of blackcurrant bushes on one of their plots, and they very kindly offered to let us pick some blackcurrants from their bushes – they said they’d already taken huge numbers home, made jam, frozen them …. and there were still loads left on the plants (there still is now and we took a couple of kilos!).

Decided to make blackcurrant jelly rather than jam, given the number of tiny seeds in blackcurrants. Ended up grabbing a recipe from the Internet as my preserves and jams books doesn’t have blackcurrant jelly – mostly its knowing how much water and sugar to add for the type of fruit. Well, I left that dripping through the jelly bag overnight and now have a bowl of very finely sieved blackcurrent juice ready for the second stage (incidentally, I found that at the local supermarket, the “jam” sugar with added pectin was about 2/3rds the cost of normal granualted sugar, I’m sure jam sugar is normally considerably morse expensive!).

Also mixed up a batch of sorbet – we’ve had an ice cream maker for ages, but it can’t have been used for at least 5 years I guess (since we moved to the West Midlands at least…). Having prepared the sugar/syrup solution and cooled it, I found the drive link was missing from the ice cream maker, which then involved searching all the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen, all to no avail! I did however discover that the drive on our old food processor (which is still in the garage) was very similar in shape, so with the application of a hammer, screwdriver and a Stanley blade, I refashioned the drive so it fitted … and hey presto, 40 mins later, enough churning to transfer it to the freezer. We haven’t yet tried out the sorbet, so I don’t know if 40 mins was long enough or if the ice crystals will be too large and we’ll get a gritty sorbet… At least I don’t have to go with the manual option of freeze, blend, freeze, blend, freeze, blend ….. I think I’ll try and get the proper drive for the ice cream maker – looks like Partmaster have the drive and paddle available.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Aconcagua.

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!

I don’t think this is something which will have affected us – we only applied 1 small bag of manure to our plot (though some sites indicate the effects can last up to 3 years, so we don’t really know). I heard some mention of this a few days ago, but it was mentioned on the TV this morning, so I thought I’d do some further investigation…

There are reports (see here, here, here, here and here in the comments) of crop problems at a number of allotment sites and it looks like the cause is from manure which is contaminated with a herbicide. The contamination seems to have been caused by having been sprayed on grass which is then either used as food or bedding for cattle or horses. As some farmers buy in feed for their animals, they may be unaware of the spraying themselves so it might actually be quite difficult to determine how safe the manure is for use on food crops.

The RHS have posted some advice on the causes, symptoms and what to do, though basically it looks like you shouldn’t eat affected crops.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Malene Thyssen.