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…
No dig growing
Allotment update 18/6/2018
It's a day under four weeks since my last allotment blog and it was the comparison in the pictures above that prompted me to do an update. The growth rate in the last few weeks has been something to behold. I am now harvesting quite a range of crops and a few more are very…
Allotment update – 22/5/2018
The weather has been settled for a week or two, so I'm more or less up to date on where I want to be on my plot. Peas, potatoes and parsnips are the only things I've sown directly on the plot, everything else has been raised under glass and planted out. Peas and potatoes are…
Allotment update – 11/4/2018
I read allotment blogs out of curiosity about what other people are up to rather than to learn how to do things. Now and then an idea will come up that I will try out but on the whole I have found ways that work for me and am reluctant to depart from them. This…
Allotment update – 28/3/2018
I’m into my fifth year of recording seed sowing dates for both veg and flowers. It gets a bit more patchy at the pricking off stage and worse still for planting out. I thought it would tell me how far behind I am this year, but it actually tells me very little. It feels like…
Allotment update 11/2/2018
I made a quick visit to my allotment earlier. The wind was slicing across the very open site and, seeing very little that needed doing urgently, I didn’t stay long. My leeks were a dismal failure; almost all of them produced flower stems. Sown too early seems to be the verdict. Spinach beet is OK,…
Allotment update.
During the summer I was up to my plot at least every other day, now it's more like every other week. Such crops as I have still standing seem to include several that have not covered themselves in glory this year, rusty leeks, piddling little parsnips, moth eaten spinach. Cauli's were not bad, but you…
Composting.
When something in gardening is agreed by absolutely everyone to be a good thing it seems perverse to ask the question “why?”. I tend to the view that that is when it most needs to be asked. Composting and the multiple benefits of compost are among of the great untouchable sacred cows of gardening, especially…
On not digging.
In a few days time I shall be 65. Digging is either good exercise or hard work, depending on your perspective. Mine is that it is hard work and getting harder, so it seems to me that if I can get results as good without digging as with, why would I dig. Like many people,…
Allotment half term report.
Midsummer seems like an appropriate time to take stock. Most things have done well; I think I have the soil management side of things where I want it. My failures and problems are not soil related: cabbage root fly, not enough water and as of today, mice going for my peas. The one thing that…
garden ruminations 