Black plastic

Many thanks to Andy who laid his hands on a big roll of silage plastic and kindly donated some to the cause. Went down today and cut a very large piece to cover the plots that we wont be using untill spring. Hopefully most of the grass and weeds will be killed off.

p1010039.JPG

Onions and Garlic

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

Masses done

Had a really productive day on Sat after a few weeks of not doing much due to the weather.

Paul has borrowed his dads van so we were able to do loads of rubbish clearing in a short space of time. Next we moved on to roofing the shed and moving the guttering and waterbutt so we should now start collecting water at a faster pace.

We used some corrugated plastic to construct a couple of tunnels and planted a couple more rows of mixed radish. The first crop of radish were also harvested, not at their biggest but tasting really sweet and spicey.

And then.. the main event… ROTORVATING!

Paul had borrowed the rotorvator and finally we had the chance to put it through its paces. Much harder than we had anticipated, but once we had the knack of it we were soon hacking through the soil. One bed now completed for the onions and garlic, we will try to get the rest done soon and hope the frost breaks it down some more over winter. Hopefully ill have a rotorvating video to put on soon, keep an eye out.

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.

Radish

Update to first patch. Have now added a row of radish in between the broccoli and cauliflower as a bit of an experiment. Just used half of the seeds and will sow the other half under cloches in a few weeks when we have cleared more patches.

Have also successfully installed the water butt next to the shed and have rigged up some guttering and pipework, just need to wait for it to fill.

Yesterday also saw the acquisition of a key to the storage container at the end of the allotment site. It is good and secure and be very useful for storing our equipment in.

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.

Field Trip

Just returned from 10 days visiting my parents in South West France. Went for a break but also managed to get lots of good info on growing things by looking at their veg plot. The climate they get there allows them to grow stuff we’d have no chance with, such as watermelons ect (although they’ve had a bad year this year, too much wet) I have plenty of tips for home made cloches, straw mulch, using old branches as cains and have also been able to collect a variety of seeds to try in the spring. I also have managed to scrounge some netting to protect our fruit bushes which they will bring over for me when they are next home.

will add pics soon

Clearing update

An updated image of how the site clearence is going. It’s taken the four of us less than a week and we’ve really cracked on.

 

Seed Order

Had a ‘meeting’ last night to decide what we wanted to start growing over the winter ready for next spring. I put in an order with Dobies today and we should be able to get planting over the coming month or two.

Seed order

174271     Onion Sets: Dobies Autumn Champion

173772     Garlic – Spanish Roja

438401     Radish Rougette seeds

480422     Oriental Leaf Vegetable Collection

480432     Broccoli, Cabbage & Cauliflower Collection

173861     Shallot Bulbs: Griselle

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.