ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
I cannot pretend that there is much happening on my allotment so this will be a short post. As I have explained in earlier posts, I am trying to keep as much growing in my soil over winter as possible and have been filling every available space with cover crops for the last few months.…
At this time of year growth has slowed a great deal and not a lot changes from one month's end to the next. Or so I thought, perhaps wrongly. Perhaps it just seems that way. The bed in the picture below was cleared of maincrop potatoes and sown with green manure seeds on 22nd September.…
The traditionalists around me at my allotment site have cleared away their summer crops and dug the ground over to be left rough over winter for frost to break it down. NOT my plot I'm not a traditionalist and have come to regard such behaviour as sadly misguided. For me they are damaging soil structure,…
Another month has passed so another allotment post is due. I've been looking at some veg growing stuff on YouTube and there is a wealth of advice about what to do and how to do it, not all of which I'd agree with. What I am aiming to do is to look backwards over the…
A month ago I had just taken on another half plot, cleared a section of it and sown seeds of carrots, beetroot, perpetual spinach, chard, spring onions and lettuce. All but the lettuce germinated, mostly within a week to ten days. Emergence was a little patchy and in the weeks since the rows have become…
Three weeks on from my last allotment post and I'm quite surprised at how much has changed, given that we're approaching mid October. I'd cleared space between my new tunnel and the end of the plot. On the 24th I planted strawberries that I took from my abandoned plot 3. The foliage was pretty skanky…
It was April 1st 2013 that I first took on an allotment, plot 6. In August 2014 my employment came to an abrupt end and I have a photograph from 11th September 2014 showing my second plot with the grass yellowing, presumably having been sprayed with weedkiller a week or so earlier. I took it…
The area between my new tunnel and the end of the plot has largely been abandoned to nettles for the last four years or more. Now that I'm giving up my second plot, I cannot afford to have such wasted space so I had to grasp the nettle, absolutely literally, and bring it back into…
OK, let's keep this brief. The allotment post I did a week ago was the first since October 2022, a gap of nearly two years. The seeds I reported on in the tunnel last week are growing apace and I have planted out small lettuce plants beside them. Three have been eaten by slugs but…
Sometimes with vegetable gardening you get in a bit of a rut, repeating what you did the year before, dropping a crop because it's repeatedly unsuccessful or you don't ever seem to eat it. It starts to get a bit boring. I had two plots, one of which I only took on because I needed…
Continue reading ➞ Allotment shenanigans, 5th September 2024
garden ruminations 