I grow a dozen or so named Dahlia varieties in the garden and three or four up the allotment. For the last few years I have collected seed from some of them and sowed them in March of the following year. I grow them on and plant them out on my allotment around May. They…
Allotment & vegetable growing
Allotment update – 19/11/2019
It wont have escaped the notice of any UK gardeners that it’s been very wet lately. I try to stay off my rather fragile silty soil in such conditions as it’s structure is rapidly degraded by my big feet. Today though was the third dry day we’ve had in a row, practically a drought, so…
Carrots
The picture above is of some carrots that I dug up on my allotment two days ago. As I explained back in June, I have taken to sowing carrots in deep pots and planting them out as an undisturbed pot full once they are a couple of inches high. I started to do this because…
Allotment update – 12/8/2019
I haven't had much to say about my veg growing this year and I have to admit that the weedy appearance of the plot suggests my enthusiasm for it has faltered a little. I don't think it has by much but I have probably not done as well this year as last, mainly because I…
Allotment update – 17/6/2019
If you followed this blog for what I had to say about my allotment then I'm afraid you've had thin pickings this year, this being only my second post about it. It seems to have been a year where everything has been done in a very fragmented way so there never seems to have been…
Allotment update – 10/4/2019
It's been a while since I posted anything about my allotment. We've had some very mild weather and things are maybe a little ahead of where they'd usually be, but not by much. Last year I sowed peas on 13 April; today I sowed this year's, three days earlier. I'd sown a strip of Italian…
A Sowing of Seeds
I claim no special knowledge of growing plants from seed. I’ve done a lot of it and I think I’ve had reasonable results, but I’ve had my share of failures too. There is an abundance of information available online about seed sowing, to the point that I wonder why I bother writing about my own…
Allotment update – 24/10/2018
My alloment is divided down the middle by a windbreak. Each half is further divided into two, creating four sections for my four year crop rotation. It happens that this year one side of the windbreak is almost empty, summer crops having been removed and nothing put in to replace them, while the other side…
Allotment update – 12/9/2018
I meant this to be a monthly snapshot, but there has been slippage, my last allotment post being at the end of July. That was just after we'd had the first rain for ages but before anything was showing any benefit from it. My runner beans had cropped well through the hot spell, sustained by…
Dahlias
The honest truth is that I don't have much to say about Dahlias. I grow quite a lot, I love them. When I say quite a lot, I have around two dozen in the garden, almost all named varieties that I've bought, plus 56 seedlings that I've raised myself which are growing on my allotment. The…
