More produce

 

Bucket o Spuds

 

Beans

 

Red currants

  

Oriental Crop

Not been down to the alloment for over a week as we’ve been on holiday. Managed to get down there today and were pleased to find a good crop of oriental veg ready for picking.

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Just had a mixture with seabass for tea, great to strt eating our iwn proper veg.

The cabbage, broccoli and colli are coming on well but the radish seem to have slowed down in the cold weather, although the mixed radish we sowed under cloches are coming along fine.

Onions and Garlic

Onions , Shallots and Garlic went in tonight. Me and Paul just had enough time to get them in before darkness loomed.

Oriental Leaf Vegetable Collection

Finally took delivery of the oriental leaf collection this evening. The first delivery should have come weeks ago but Royal Mail seem to have lost it for a while and the first lot arrived dead. Dobies to their credit sent out another batch which only took a week to come so we set about getting them in the ground straight away.

The brassicas are coming along really well apart from a couple of slug casualties and are easy to maintain thanks to the weed suppressing fabric we used. We decided to use more of the fabric for the orientals so got ourselves a big roll. Three of us spent an hour down there tonight and now have seven new rows to tend.

First patch planted

After a good 3 hours or so of toiling we have planted the first set of veg into the allotment. Quite a few weeds had sprouted over the week during the rain but we dug them out, turned the soil and raked it smooth.

 We now have a patch containing the Broccoli, Cabbage & Cauliflower Collection, carefully guarded from the weeds by some of that weed supressing fabric that we found in the old shed. Put down a good covering of homemade compost as well as some organic fertillizer. I will be making some cloche tunnels to protect them as soon as I’ve scrounged some polyhthene, but had to get them in today as the plugs were delivered a couple of days ago and were screaming to go in.

Organic or not?

Weve been having a long hard think over the past few months over weather to have an organic allotment or not. I think it finally came to the crunch yesterday as we started to clear some of the weed mass from the site.

To start of with, due to the sheer scale of the clearing job, we are going to use a chemical weed killer to get us going. Hopefully this will break the back of most of the work and then we can go on from there using only organic methods. I could do with finding out how long after using chemicals you have to wait before being able to have an organic claim? possibly a few seasons?

Ive built a makeshift compost heap where we can break down some of the smaller bits that we are pulling up but the remainder will have to be lugged to the tip. I also need to find out if we can burn waste in a drum on the site. This will certainly make things much easier and give us some ash to chuck on the compost.