Keeping Weed Free

Click photo’s to enlarge them.

I love this time of year when we begin to harvest the crops. And covering our Brassica family up to stop pests from Spring with nets has certainly reduced the influx of caterpillars and white fly.

Broccoli and Cauliflowers

We are also happy with the way our Allotment Greenhouse is ripening our tomatoes and they are further forward than our greenhouse tomatoes at home.

Tomatoes in the Allotment

Green but growing nicely

We uncovered the Chard from the nets and I set too to weed between them. This veggie is so versatile. we enjoy the young leaves in Salads, but its wonderful steamed like spinach

Rainbow Chard

Peas

The Pea rows are now in flower and producing pods, But to be honest this is not our best year for peas, the small covered  cloche  to the right is another Pea row. Again these have not germinated well. It appears many of us got our peas from the allotment association and many of us have had the same problem of poor germination. I had to re-set the row you see growing as it began life as two rows of 3 a breast.. But so many didn’t grow I transferred into one long row.   I will be  uncovering weeding and seeing how these have done this week.

 

New rows of Beets and carrots, You can also see how the sweetcorn is growing and you may just make out the thin blades of Leeks . The plants in the foreground are  Celeriac . In the background are the potatoes  and manure heap under the blue tarpaulin 

Keeping the above weed free is a full-time job. no sooner have you finished one part of the allotment than another is ready for clearing.  This is what I have been up to most days of this week. And my back now knows about it.

Turnips

The blue tarpaulin you can see at the top of the large picture above on our plot is the left over manure from the trailer load we had delivered last year.  We were amazed at how much was still left over.

My Hubby decided to move it as we had several empty compost bins.. He filled seven and still there was some left over. Each Bin contains 8 barrow loads of Muck, He moved around 60 barrow loads over a two-day period.

Some of you have been asking for an idea of how large the allotments are and how big our plots are..

I hope in the next post to have taken a few pictures to give a better understanding of our Allotments Association . And how because most of us have not got fences, how difficult it is to stop those wishing to take what you have grown.

Until next Time

Happy Gardening !

~Sue~