Allotment Geekery

A week away from the allotment and it has gone crazy!  Our peas have produced a good amount of pods and the additional peas I planted straight into the ground have come up and are looking healthy, I'm optimistic we'll have a good crop.  

As for our strawberries we have tonnes of them!  You can smell our little strawberry patch metres before you can even see our plot they smell absolutely delicious.  MozzyMr is great at making strawberry sauces which we'll freeze and I'm going to give jam making a bit of a go (Women's Institute ahoy!).

Our first garlic!  Planted in November we have waited, and waited and waited for the leaves to yellow and fall over, apparently this is a sign that they're ready to be dug up, and here we are!  The elephant garlic we planted a couple of months ago is making good progress it's all very exciting the only problem is that with all of the veg growing well the weeds haven't been doing so badly themselves so we have a lot of work to do to get things back to how it looked before we went on holiday.

Allotment geekery

Sunday saw MozzyMr and I working on the allotment, so far the cabbages are going well:

The garlics are coming along a treat:

The tomato seedlings we had growing on the kitchen window sill have been re-potted and moved to the the polytunnel ready to be planted in our raised bed properly when they're a little stronger.

The first batch of potatoes are in:

And the carrot plot has been weeded, raked and fleeced to warm the soil, in a couple of weeks we'll dig it through, sieve it and plant our carrot seeds out.

We harvested our first crop of purple sprouting broccoli as well, it was a bit buggy and needed a good wash but was delicious and was well worth the 4 or so month wait.  Things are getting exciting again on the plot and I hope this year we'll expand range of veg and have a year of good eating...

Further Allotment Geekery

So this Saturday we extended our allotment empire by one raised bed, a mere raised bed?  Yep, but this bad boy is in a polytunnel which means tomatoes, chillies, and peppers galore!

We're plot 16 on the right in between two experts: Rodney and Liz (they already have seedlings on the go, this may not sound much but I haven't even finished digging over the rest of the plot).

Mmmmm new top soil (yeah you heard me).

And finally garlic (ignore the weeds they've gone now), just waiting for a frost to split the cloves. 

Well that's quite a lot of excitement for one day...... ta ra for now.