Uncategorized – Allotment

11th June ’22

General weedery. Plenty of carrots to come it looks like, and parsnips.

10th June ’22

Broad beans! The plants are dripping with them!

The harsh cutting back and removal of suckers does seem to be working with the toms so I’ll be doing that again next year 🙂

The Borlotti beans – or Polish Climbing beans are aptly named! This is three days of climbing.

Overdue a couple of overview shots of the main beds.

Potato bed — 50 odd seed spuds. Potatoes for days (months)

Cabbage, Kohl Rabi, Pak Choi, Kale, Spinach and further down, there are twelve sweetcorn. Couple of rows are seeded with cabbage for the winter (January King 3). Also, weeds.

8th June ’22

So the beans love the strings it seems!

Climbers! — I didn’t tease them round at all! Promise!

Generally the polytunnel is going great.

The new bath doesn’t appear to leak which is generally good in a pond…

7th June ’22

No further damage visible after recovering the stuff that got ate. In the end I cut a small hole in the net to let the Broad Bean out 😀

Otherwise, threw up a few quick strings for the Borlotti beans and the Cucumber in the polytunnel.

Ooops. When I was last at the allotment I noticed the broad bean in the outdoor bed was getting crushed by its bird net. So I took it off, thinking the plants would be strong enough without. Damn, got that wrong. The pigeons have devoured the Purple Sprouting Broccoli that we got from someone’s front wall. Sadge. They completely ignored everything else but I covered it back up anyway.

Also a bit of a lightbulb moment. The peas weren’t going well , weren’t getting much more than a couple of inches tall. I now realise that’s because that’s when the pigeons could reach and eat the tips… D’oh.

Need to sort both asap… It’s all learning 😀

4th June ’22

Productive day!

Planted 6 new corn seedlings with the others. Sowed some radish, beetroot and a few (four :D) carrot seeds in the unused bit by the peas – which aren’t doing well 🙁

Did some solid weeding in one of the main strips, and sowed two rows of Cabbage (January King 3). Left room for another row to go in at the end of the month.

Ranger Bob

Fortunately the allotments offer a one time Ranger Bob strimming service. He’s a shadowy figure you never see but his work is legendary.

So honestly not sure if things look better or worse at this point. The weeds were hiding a multitide of sins. It’s bumpy, some of these weeds look like they’ve been here years and there’s SO MUCH broken glass and other non bio-degradable waste it’s not funny. There’s also carpet embedded deep in the soil that disintegrates into single fibres and rubber that leaches toxins into the soil… Impossible to totally remove :p It was once considered a useful mulch as a thick carpet will let zero light through, but now it’s the bane of people taking on old allotments.