Another New Garden Season~ January Update

The lane we walk once inside the Allotment gates down to our plot.  One the left you can see the water cisterns which are at intervals along the lane.

Well Christmas has come and gone, and already we are halfway through January. And even though the picture below shows early morning frost, this image was taken on the 20th December of last year, as we were up early collecting our sprouts for the Christmas Dinner.. We have had loads of rain and everywhere is quite soggy. 

In the Autumn Hubby moved both of our Apple trees..  While we got some apples off of one tree, the other was covered in scab.. A good site to find out how to care for your apples, how to plant, store and treat diseases is here. https://www.gardenersworld.com/plants/essential-apple-care-guide  As we do not like to use any type of pesticides or chemicals on any of our produce.. We just take pot luck and find alternative treatments for problems..   Ten tips on Homemade Organic Pesticides can be found at this site, The Global Healing Centre or you can listen to the short two minute video telling you how to mix them on the link.   

Our neighbouring allotments plums which over hung where the apple trees were also diseased.. So we took the decision and replanted our apple trees to their new position, pruning them back hard.. It means we may not get much fruit this coming year.. But it will give the roots a chance to grow and hopefully they will like it better where they now have been planted..

Apple Trees.. A Cooker and a lovely sweet rosy eating apple… I confess I forgot what varieties they were..

The Kidney beans are now pulled up.. We still have plenty of sprouts and about a row of parsnips left.. I will be sad when these are finished I have enjoyed them roasted several times a week.. 

Our Manure arrived on Saturday, a huge tractor trailer load full.. The heap is bigger than me. Today is the first decent day to get some of it moved.. And we have hardly made a dent in it. 

( if you hover your mouse over the below photo’s you will see the captions )

Don’t just stand there smiling, there is work to be done!..

That’s better put your back into it.

You can see I am wearing one of my knitted hats and my snood/scarf in the photo, a closer look at another one I knitted for a Christmas present is below

Hand Knitted Beret.

Remember the tuba’s of the Dahlia’s drying in the greenhouse, well here they are stored nicely in the shed. 

Dahlia Tubas in straw.

Well that is all from the Plot this month.. I hope you all have a wonderful 2020 and have a great growing season. 

Happy Gardening

Until Next Time

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~

 

 

Preparation for Spring

Well I thought it about time I wrote a post here.. Nothing much has been happening on the Allotments over the last few weeks, it has simple been far too wet to even dig.  Thankfully my Hubby got a lot of over winter digging done at the beginning of December, just as well, as the constant rain fall here in the UK has been unprecedented even for our Island where we never go far without our Umbrella’s .. I am ever thankful we live on a hill as my thoughts go out across the country to those places in Yorkshire and Cumbria and parts of Scotland that have been hit so hard with major flooding of thousands of Homes. 

The last day I went along to see how the allotment was progressing and to pick some Kale , Leeks and Beetroot and Red cabbage was when we had that wonderful Full Moon. So brilliant was it, that it could still be seen early in the morning in the sky over the allotment plots

Full Moon Over The Allotments

 My Husband had been busy and had put an extra piece of wood around the green house and connected extra water barrels. 

Greenhouse fence at side

Here you can see the barrels and the strawberry plant from the shoots taken from last years plants

Below you can see to where he has dug in the manure..  We will not manure the parts where some of our Crops are going as some root veggies do not like it.. 

Winter digging in the manure

Still a Large pile of manure which will last.

Here you can see a row of what is left of the Brussels Sprouts ..  A row of carrots beneath the weeds and a row of beetroot in front.. 

Here is where we planted the garlic and it’s coming on nicely. There is still a couple of Lettuce under the cloche

Leeks and Red and more spouts

I am in the process of learning about planting with the Moon Cycles.. I had expressed my interest to my daughter who thoughtfully included as one of her Christmas gifts to me a book that I am finding fascinating reading,, It is called  Luna and Biodynamic Gardening by Matt Jackson.  Which can be found on line HERE  and I am in the process of planning out my garden to try to adhere to the principles of sewing and harvesting by the Moon.. This is a first for me too.. So we shall see how this experiment goes and if I can keep to it? 

 

May I just wish all of you who kindly follow this Blog a Very Happy New Year for 2016 and Beyond.. And thank you most sincerely.  

May you all be blessed and continue with your own  

Happy Gardening! 

October Update

Nothing much to report, except the Manure arrived from the farm. 

 

This was a large trailer of Manure delivered from the farm.. Unfortunately it overspilled right over the leeks.

 

Get your back into it girl, 🙂 ~ Hubby did All of the heavy work..  

This is the raspberry and Blueberry patch, which was in need of weeding.

While Hubby moved some of the Muck I got stuck into weeding and pruning the Raspberry and Blueberries. The above is the before photo and below is the after one. Sorry to say those lovely webs were no longer visible.. But the spiders sure came out to protest.. I did say a huge sorry for taking away their homes.. but I am sure they crawled away to make new ones. 

 

After weeding this patch I went along two more rows and cleared out the debris

Hubby walking in the distance, the frame is an old garden swing, which had the runner beans on . We hoe through about once a week to ensure the new weeds do not get a chance to take hold.. 

Saved Runner Beans pods for seeds

Runner beans were left to dry on the plants and are saved for seeds.. we had been using saved seeds which were 5 yrs old, so it was time for new stock

Thankfully we got the pruning done and some Muck spread before the rain set in.. So today I made more tomato soup, recipe on my pages  and a Ginger slab cake..This recipe is on my main blog, but both recipes  are tried and tested and delicious. 

Hubby did the hard work of spreading it here.. Lucky its rained after we did this, so it will get dug in really soon, We plan to put the new strawberry shoots in a bed once it’s been dug in. The new shoots from the Strawberries you can just see in the greenhouse.. 

This afternoon I got out my Knitting needles again, as I bought some Aran Yarn that was a bargain the other day, I so wanted to knit another waistcoat in the same pattern as this. I made the other year. But the Wool is not as chunky as the original pattern. So I had to figure out how I needed to alter the stitches and needle sizes accordingly.. I had several false starts.. And had to unravel my efforts.. Hubby said he didn’t know how I could knit something to unravel it after doing several rows.. ( Practice and Patience ) 🙂 .. 

Anything is Possible if we put our minds to it. 

Happy Gardening..

And enjoy your Harvests and Craft time.

See you All Soon!