Allotment geekery

It has been a busy, busy week at work so I haven't been able to get to the allotment during the week, we'll be heading off to plant more seeds and dig things over today.  To get my allotment fix I've been monitoring the progress of the following:

Borlotti beans, I cannot wait to get these out when it's warm enough I dug compost trenches back in the autumn and have been filling them with kitchen scraps and newspaper etc  because apparently beans love compost rich soil.  I  dug compost trenches last year and it seemed to work quite well, fingers crossed the beans like it!

Tomatoes and chillies, I really can't take credit for these, tomatoes and chillies are MozzyMr's pet project, we're still using the chillies he grew last year which we dried.  Plus the amount of passata we're still getting through is astonishing!  Great on homemade pizza though so no complaints here.

Pfft mushrooms.  These were supposed to be butternut squashes but nothing has happened with them so I'm going to have to buy more seeds because the butternut squashes we had last year were the best.  The compost we bought from Makro was riddled with fungus, green and blue mushrooms have been popping up all over the place.  The umbrella looking ones here only stay looking like that for a day and then they shrivel up to virtually nothing.  Whilst I haven't got the butternut squashes I really wanted it has been nice to see these develop, they're really delicate and beautiful (photographs them and unceremoniously chucks them in the compost bin).

Allotment Geekery

This Saturday there wasn't roller derby training because the team were playing in Plymouth, sadly as I am crawling on my hands and knees towards payday I had to go for free activities, i.e. clearing up weeds on the allotment.  Monty said we should bring our pumpkins in to avoid frost damage so bring the pumpkins in we did and very happy I am with them too.  Not only that but we had two medium sized flower pots filled with tomatoes, a basket full of runner beans, four butternut squashes, two peppers, four leeks and a large handful of spring onions.

Oh and in case you're wondering I'm going to save the seeds from the sunflower.  This one grew from the sunflowers we grew for the wedding so I want to see if I can keep the same 'family' of sunflowers growing next year 

Allotment Geekery

Hooray hooray!  Bonfire season is upon us at the allotment.  For weeks now we have been drying out material for the first bonfire and what happened the night before?  Masses, and masses of rain.  Never the less we (MozzyMr) got some level of fire going and we are well underway clearing all of the weeds.

I think I'm a little early here but I'm getting my first onion sets in, as in first time I've ever grown onions and first batch of successional planting.  The garlics turned out well so I'm feeling optimistic about growing massive onions.  The bigger the better!

As per Monty's instructions I've cleared away the foliage from my pumpkins so they can start ripening, to carve or to eat?

Carrots.  They didn't work out so well for me.  We saw a man on Gardener's World plant them in tubs and he produced lots of small but perfectly formed carrots, mine were just small.

I have a new found love of runner beans, my gran used to grow them in such quantities that as a kid I never wanted to see another runner bean in my life.  Plus there is the runner bean chutney incident, we don't speak of the runner bean chutney incident.  

Last of the tomato crop, we must have had around 120lbs this year, not bad going.  We have a lot of passata in the freezer now...

Allotment Geekery

Ahhhh this is probably the best part of the allotment year in my opinion.  We're still harvesting loads of veg but we're also clearing down the bind weed and other nasties and drying them out ready for the bonfire season which starts in October.  We've cleared down a far amount, this is some of what we have left:

Now, the following compost bin might not look much to you, but it's been a long time in the making on our plot.  We've had one of those plastic council dalek do-dah compost bins since we started but they're rubbish and MozzyMr has been talking about building one out of palettes for AGES, and now we have one!  Shame it's almost full already...

The polytunnel is teeming at the moment, our little plot is full to the brim with tomatoes and a couple of other bits, including a baby melon!  How exciting, can't wait for it to be big enough to eat.

The following bits of veg aren't ours but I had to take some photos to show you how others are using their polytunnel plots.  We do have some chilli's and peppers growing but frankly we grew too many tomatoes and they haven't got as much light as they needed, next year we won't bother with so many tomatoes, they're nice but I am OVER tomato soup.

Allotment Geekery

At last!  Tomatoes and daft shaped ones at that!  The odd shaped ones pictured to the left are the Black Krim variety but we have plum, cherry, and money-maker varieties on the go as well.

Allotment Geekery

There was an Open Day at the allotment this weekend, it was supposed to be on Saturday but with Red Warnings for floods and already sodden ground it was postponed until Sunday.  There were a number of activities including a quiz, and as it turns out I got 100% in the quiz and won a bottle of wine!  Laura and I then worked on getting sloshed so the rest of the photos aren't the best quality, sorry about that.

The big job of the day was thinning out the leeks, if the packet says sew thinly you don't just chuck the whole pack in and hope for the best cos the little buggers grow.  Each leek has to be dropped into a hole and then watered, you don't fill with soil because they need room to fill the space.  I anticipate hating leeks by the end of the year having so many, but I've never grown them before so at this stage I'm still excited.  

The tomatoes are still growing but none of them are turning red, am I just being impatient?  Luckily though the courgettes are finally coming along quite nicely, the yellow variety are a winner and so sweet, definitely growing them again.

And finally there were several little bunches of flowers being sold, with everything from rosemary to sweetpeas in each bunch, they smell amazing and give me a good excuse to get my ice cream cone vase out.

Life via the Medium of Rainbow

Allotment Geekery

Sunday at the allotment, the butternut squashes have gone in...

the strawberries are flowering...

the lavender is on it's way...

the peas seem to be liking their new home and have started to produce pods already...

carrots!

too many tomatoes...

...and finally kites and shadows.  MozzyMr and I were suffering after a Birthday celebration at the Double Locks for friend Charlotte.  Too many ciders made us a bit broken, so we crawled to the allotment in the hope it might be restorative, a bit of sun and digging sorted me right out not sure about MozzyMr he seems to want to eat all the cake and sleep in his armchair.

Allotment Geekery

A couple of weeks ago we found these wire bakery trays at the dump, hung above our plot in the polytunnel it almost doubles the amount of space we have for germinating seeds and generally growing stuff.

MozzyMr with the peas and courgettes.

We let the tomato plants get a bit pot bound so it was time to get them in the plot, with the wire baskets freeing up lots of space they finally got the root room they needed.  The plan is to plant basil amongst the tomatoes, Monty told me it was a good idea... bloody love Monty.

Rocking crazy allotment hair!

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...

Weird and wonderful things are happening in the kitchen

I bought MozzyMr a gourmet mushroom kit for Christmas and before he'd even activated it (you should in theory soak the bag of coffee waste which contains the mushroom spores overnight) but these came poking through the corner of the box so we thought it was best to open it up and give them some room.  They're weird things, sort of velvety and ear lobe like *shudder*.

On the other side of the kitchen on the windowsill we have the tomatoes coming up, another week and they'll be ready to transplant to the polytunnel...

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.