The Shark has Jumped...

Been a bit busy since my last post. Too much gardening, and especially weeding to do. The school had a plant sale to be prepared for. To add to the mix I was allocated a place "on the shelf" at our allotment site just as the growing season got into full swing. Happily there have been family events too. The shark is a visitor to Alnwick Castle Gardens - a great otherwise safe place to take grandchildren without foregoing horticulture! (Mind you they do have "The Poison Garden" behind a closed gate.) Excuses aside, here is the current state of play at the plot:

Pride of place goes to the potatoes.  Here's the maincrop

and here's the earlies:

The soft fruit has only recently been netted

This shot takes in the broad beans, cucurbits and bean wigwams. (There are two Shark's fin Melons amongst them!!)

And here is the reverse view of the broad beans with Jerusalem artichoke, rhubarb and peas in front

This picture shows the end of the spring cabbages with short rows of parsnip, celeriac and celery beyond

And on to the brassicas hiding under their protective netting.

and the alliums all grown from seed.  (The bed to the left is going to be carrots now that the rain has finally arrived.)

 

Hope you enjoyed this brief tour.

Composting Weeds

Warning = if you are into "No Dig" you won't like this. It is next year's cucurbits and legumes patch in my 5 way rotation. As the season progresses all my allotment weeds get stuffed into black lined bags previously used for manure or proprietary compost mixes. The bags are piled up and left to languish in the sun wherever is out of the way, until now. Yard by square yard I dig a pit, tip in a couple of foul smelling bags and then fill it in from the next square yard. This last year I collected twenty bags of weedy material. I call this fertility recycling. The runner beans, courgettes, squashes and peas seem to like it. Even the pernicious weed remnants underneath seem to get the message that they are the providers of nutrition, no longer the beneficiaries.

I do "high fibre" composting in a plastic dalek at home with the help of brandling worms. Here kitchen waste is generated and so are supplies of paper and cardboard so that the lasagne layering required to keep the greens and browns in balance are to hand. As the allotment is several miles across town the "stuff it in a light excluding bag" method seems to be more practicable. Weeds are excluded from my home compost which I use for mixing my own seed mixes and mulches. I find this a happy arrangement.

Dry Heat

Stuck indoors today because of the rain (hurray)  gives me the opportunity  to review recent progress.  The garlic crops, both winter and  spring plantings have been a bit underwhelming.  The autumn planted Elephant Garlic and home saved Early Purple Wight and Doocot I feel more forgiving toward. The spring planted Mersley Wight and  Solent Wight  got all the room and feed they required but turned yellow in early July. Digging them up they were small, showed signs of white rot and in many case developed as two stems intertwined below ground level.  While I will continue to grow my own Elephant garlic I don't think the return on the traditional sized garlic is worth it on my plot. Lesson learnt.  The picture shows the portion of the harvest that  justified storage.  Elephant garlic on the left, other autumn planted middle and spring planted on the right. The more fiddly smaller bulbs are still drying off in the greenhouse awaiting assessment for rot and suitability for cooking. 

Despite the heat and dry conditions the brassica patch seems to be full and ready for the coming (cooler) brassica season. The thin row is Swedes.  To the right are the winter harvested kales.  Now that we have had rain I am confident that they will survive to maturity.

Although a bit out of date this last picture is indicative of what is harvesting now.  Broad beans have been great and I have staggered further sowings.  Courgettes are now harvesting in torrents. Peas have been great this year, and again I have further plantings to come. Raspberries have been ripening daily. That is one days worth of ripened berries.

 So all in all I have been very happy with the produce so far this year, even though drought conditions have prevailed until yesterday.  

Summer Plot Review

 

A lovely morning of sunshine, after what seems like weeks of wind and cloud - but no rain to speak of.  So off to the plot to water.

Alliums in the foreground. The leeks onions and shallots are green, but the yellow strip is three rows of garlic.  (Digging up the first few they are rather disappointing.) The potatoes behind are looking really happy. 

And what pretty flowers on the Blue Danube!

Beside the alliums the brassica patch is looking a bit sparse, but is nearly full up now and will come into its own later when the seedlings put on some leaf.

The cucurbits are showing plenty of leaf now. Fruit will follow and an avalanche of courgettes is anticipated.

Separated by a row of broad beans that has been cropping for weeks we have celeriac, celery and runner beans. I have high hopes for all three. The runners have just reached the top of the canes and I pinched out the tops today.

One rather unsightly crop is peas  (alongside a second,later, row of broad beans). The pigeons discovered the peas, but not before they had podded. While they decimated the leaves and stems the pods were not to their taste, so we humans got them!  Next year either taller pea sticks or netting will be deployed.

Last word goes to the carrots. Not pretty due to the protective net, but they deliver for months provided you keep the net on and the root fly out.

So, all in all, I am pretty happy with progress on the vegetable plot so far this year.

Picking Up At The Plot

 I have been indulging my newfound interest in flowering plants and particularly wildflowers recently. Despite appearances I have been keeping up with the production of edibles too.  To bring the record up to date, here is a statement of the current state of play.

I went for alliums in a bigger way this year growing autumn and spring planted garlic as well as shallots and onions from seed. These were sown indoors in February .  The garlic has emerged and shallot and onion have been planted out on site yesterday and today. 

Broad beans sown in cells and planted out a month ago are now sitting pretty at the plot. 

Peas on the other hand have refused to be cajoled into germinating early. As a last resort I have started them sprouting in a jam jar in the kitchen and only "sown" them in cells after germination and exporting them to the greenhouse and then the plot.

Still on legumes I have sown 5 varieties of Dwarf French Bean into deep cells in the hope that the improved night temperatures will help them get started.

The greenhouse has been stuffed full each night with the paraffin heater lit on any night when the threat of frost is flagged up by the weatherman.  The main beneficiaries are flowers: Cosmos, Marigold, Lobelia, but also tomato, cucumber and pepper 

Tomatoes and Cucumber

Pepper Hungarian Hot Wax

I have attempted direct sowing at the allotment but tend to hedge my bets by using up remnant seed supplies (open packets from last year or out of date ones).  This way I don't get upset when they fail - although failure is also more likely as a result!  Parsnip, carrot, Swish chard have been experimented with in this way - and have all been resown recently..

Good Friday is a traditional potato planting day.  Easter Saturday and Sunday saw me getting all but the maincrop Rooster in. 

Potatoes in waiting

The patch allocated to potatoes in my rotational plan still had "spring" cabbages at one end and leeks at the other.  Now that's what I call bad planning! The leeks are going into the cookpot.

The ground for runner beans, celery and celeriac has been thoroughly prepped with plenty of buried organic matter.  The celery and celeriac have been growing on at home

Celery and Celeriac  - Can you tell which is which?

 but the runner beans have yet to be sown.  The courgettes squashes and sweetcorn haven't been sown either yet, but I have recently prepared a bed for them too.  My method is to bag all my weeds and trimmings in old black lined compost bags and leave them for a year or two to rot down in the hope that after another year buried underground any weed seeds will not be viable.  This keeps all the nutrients recycled on the site - all except the edible part of any crops.  

Weed suppression is something I take very seriously.  The best method is to have a crop growing but failing that deployment of weed suppressant fabric in the early part of the growing season saves hours of repetitive weeding.  As the sowing season progresses so the aesthetically unpleasing fabric gets rolled back. 

Brassicas tend to be at their best late in the growing year. None more so than purple sprouting broccoli which is currently in full production mode. 

 One again my lack of planning means the row of PSB plants is right in the middle of this year's carrot patch (under the fine mesh).  The PSB needs nets to keep the pigeons off while the carrots need fine netting to keep the carrot root fly off. so it is a bit of a logistic nightmare to cater for them both simultaneously.  As the early carrot sowing show no sign of germination yet perhaps there is no imminent prospect of running out of space just yet - the main crop carrots can wait until the PSB harvesting season is over.

This years brassicas and leeks are coming on at home in readiness for planting out. It iis going to be busy for the next month or two!

Early season brassicas

Leeks

 

Allotment Tour May

It is raining again today, but yesterday was a surprise sunny day.  I took the opportunity to take some snaps of the allotment.  First, appropriately, the potato patch.

The shaws are appearing above ground and very soon it will be time to mound them.

Beyond the potatoes is the fruit cage.  The first of the three bays was strawberries.  Notoriously these have to be moved around in order to avoid build up of disease.  So currently this bay is garlic,  Elephant to the left, ordinary to the right.  In between are two rows of parsnips which are indistinguishable from the germinating weeds currently.  But believe me they are there!

The remainder of the fruit cage is more conventionally raspberries and a mixture of currants and berries:

Reaching the turn at the end I am most pleasantly surprised by these autumn planted red onion sets.  I had given them up for lost but come the new year they have reappeared and are thriving.

Also at that end are spring planted onion sets (tent to the left ) Carrots (temple to the right) and leeks between them.  Next  is onions and shallots from seed (I went a bit mad on alliums this year) and the start of the brassica patch in front of that in the picture below.

Working back to the start I have covered the ground, temporarily with weed suppressant fabric.  This is going to be the the other half of the brassica patch and the legume/cucurbit patch which currently only has broad beans and a row of peas on the go along with some salads.  The runner bean poles are up in readiness but the runner beans are only now germinating back at home.

Broad beans (under netting)

For the sake of completeness here is the last section with strawberries and blueberries to the left, rhubarb to the right and asparagus bed featured in my last post in the middle.

 

So there you have it.  Together with the seedling nursery at home this is my vegetable home!  Hope you enjoyed the tour.

Note To Self

 The cucurbits have curled up,  the beans have been, the lettuce is letting up - it's that time of year again.  Time to take stock.  What worked - and what didn't?

Worked                                            

• Winter Squash
• Carrots under nets
• Potatoes
• Raspberries
• Blueberries
• Tosca onions from seed
• Late season lettuces and Italian Endive varieties

No Go

• Sweetcorn - Three strikes and you are out.  
• Spanish Flag (Ipomoea lobata) and Spanish Dancer (Linaria reticulata) - These belong in Spain and don't like the climate in Edinburgh
• French Climbing Beans  - no competition for runner beans.  Dwarf French beans don't seem to be as sensitive.  Curiously Italian Barlotti beans don't seem to be as temperamental.  Mind you they are  grown for drying not for pods.
• French Cornet Endive varieties.  Cornet de Bordeaux bolted every time.

Happy Potatoes

French beans left - Runners right

Tosca Onions

In the Summertime - 4 Seasons in One

The summer solstice has arrived and it is time to review the four seasons square foot beds: 

Summer

Swiss Chard			Garlic			Onions
Parsley			Pea Jaguar			Strawberry
Radish			Leaf Beet			Elephant Garlic

These items should be ready for harvesting in a week's time. All except the radish which seedlings the birds demolished!

Allotment Tour 27/5/20

 Here is the current state of play in my warts and all circuit of the plot:

Rhubarb is at one end (together with a globe artichoke).  The bare patch before the blueberry pen and strawberries is my aspiring asparagus patch.

...beyond which is the potato patch...

...then peas and beans (with their scrap heap supports) ...

...climbing beans and cucurbits (currently finding their feet under netting). The cages are protecting celeriac. ...

Beyond that is currently a sight for sore eyes - soon to house sweetcorn and my brassica patch.

That takes you from end to end on one side.  Heading back along the other side in the reverse direction you start with the fruit cage.  This is three bays (Berries/Raspberries/Strawberries)...

...but the last (former strawberry bay) now has been given over to new salad sowings...

We are big on carrots - but so is the carrot root fly so they have to be covered .

Bringing up the rear are the alliums.  Onions to the left, garlic and elephant garlic to the right.

That gets you back to the shed!

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