Harvesting the goodies from our allotment

Ta-dah! Here are the pictures from the allotment. I am already apologising for the amount, but I want to keep some sort of record of how far the things have come at this point of the summer.

I am showing the allotment from the far end going towards the gate.
Here are my beetroot and cabbage/kale beds with nasturtium mingling with them.

 

Next to them are the pea cage (oh dear, the cage!) and runner beans on their teepee. 

The following bed is a narrow one holding our bean fence. There are some beans, but they got rather miffed by the cold start in the spring and I won't have a bumper crop like the last year. I hope the runner beans will make up for this though.

Just in the front are some courgettes and very overgrown red lettuce. That has now been removed. My courgettes were struggling too in the beginning and when a friend offered some extras, I took them. This was a mistake as her "courgettes" are the UFO pumpkins! They are lovely too, but I will have rather many of them.

On the other side of the fence I planted some yellow-orange-maroon coloured flowers to beautify my patch. What do you think?

The beds on this side of the fence have some shallots and leeks and the bed beyond it was planted with garlic, but has planted again with some bush variety of borlotti beans (fingers crossed) and more beetrooot and some lettuce.

Here is a closer look at the flowers

Just another view, this time towards the tunnel. The big scraggly things against the fence are our artichokes. Beyond the trolley is our potato bed. The tops have been cut down following the blight yellowing them overnight. As they were earlies, no harm done. We have the potatoes in the ground and will keep eating them.

In the front of the tunnel is an odd mummy. Look:

This is how I grow carrots. I don't sow at all in the spring when the fly is rife, but a bit later and even then I protect them with fleece. The container is a stylish addition; an old tumble drier drum.

The view from the tunnel door. I have since tied the tomato canes up and cut the growing tips, so we are now starting to get some tomatoes.

Cucumbers have been producing for a while already. Here is one of the long ones:

I have chillies growing in growbags as well as peppers. I am contemplating on keeping one of the chillies over winter on the window sill in our house.

The grape vine has grown LOADs this summer and I have trained it along the side wall and over the arch of the tunnel.

There are even some grapes and next year I will be even better at leaving only a few and in right places.

The bit between the potting shed/green house and the tunnel is taken up by my salad bed. At this point I have some spinach, which seems to be growing without bolting. (We are past the hot summer months and the days are shorter)

Otherwise there are the currant bushes and the strawberry field and the asparagus. Oh, the asparagus. I let it be this year and hope to harvest the coming year. All the feathery fern like growth is asparagus.

Behind the hut is the cutting garden. Here is the perennial sweet pea taking over the world.

The flowers are a tad smaller than the annual sweet peas, and rounder. They do last well as cut flowers and there are lots of them.

I'll show more of the flowers another time, here is the view round the corner though. I can see that it is hard to see in these pictures how many flowers there actually are.

Inside the hut I have more tomatoes (silly, not to be repeated next year), peppers and aubergines.

On the shelf and also on the bench is basil.

We have only one rule about growing basil in our family and that is that there can never be too much basil!

I tried to grow cucamelons this year. I have them also in the tunnel, but they seem to be doing better here. These are very small beginnings of the fruit.

I was down with gastroenteritis for a week and that has put me behind both with house keeping and gardening. Luckily it is Elf husband's holiday now, so I can sneak out in the morning after six o'clock and garden for an hour or two. It all helps. I also attempt to harvest something every morning, so I hopefully won't need to panic later on. Yesterday I brought in my second batch of mint and lavender harvest. I rigged a pin on kitchen shelf brackets and dry them there.

Today I cut a big bunch of chives, which I chopped and put into the freezer. I also brought the first lot of my beetroot harvest in.

Note to self: this is slightly too much to fit into my 10l pot. Next time slightly less, please. I filled ten jars with these. My neighbour invited me to take some of his because his wife cannot stand the smell of beetroot cooking. He added with a wistful look that he grows them for giving away and then hopes that he might get a jar of something. He will certainly get several jars from me.

I love this time of the year, when we need very little from the shops. It feels also very satisfying conserving the produce, ready to eat during the winter. 

Have you harvested anything? Harvest is also cutting herbs from a pot on your window sill!

Here I am, computer restored and ready for show and tell

Firstly BIG APOLOGIES for those who have commented, I have been truly absent and will now reply. Thank you for taking time to comment.

I have had a great big blogging hiatus, partly because our allotment took all my free time in the spring and then my computer stopped running the picture editing programme I am using. Hmph! It is now fixed thanks to Elf Husband and I can blog again. I have lots of things to show you all and since everything is slightly wonky in this end what you get and when will be a bit random. The picture above is from the one and only truly warm week we had in the beginning of July. I had to take my bird's nest hat from Tanzania in use while gardening.

In the allotment news I used much of the spring building up the allotment and getting rid of the rubbish. I gave a lick of wood preservative for the shed, so it also matched the greenhouse attached to it.

We built lids for our coldframe, which was there when we took over the allotment, but obviously not much use without the lids. I now have a whole new appreciation for the coldframe and am
SO grateful that I have one. I use it beyond the normal season to grow constant flow of salad seedlings, extra peas and root veggies.

All the pictures are at least one month old, so what you see here is far bigger now. The picture above is from June. The herb bed looked like this a month ago:

You see how the French tarragon has taken off and is for the world domination. It came from a friend's garden via our old garden and is according to my friend in better shape than the mother plant. In the other end is my mint collection and in the left bottom corner my new chives, which I grew from seed. The greens in front of the blue box is oregano, also raised from seed and in the back thyme is flowering.

The concrete path marks the separation of my neighbour's and our allotment. I have planted scented plants along the path, here it is chamomile. In the picture is part of our strawberry plot and a couple of ferny whisks of asparagus. The black currant bushes on this side of the tunnel were heavy with berries and Elf Son and I harvested about 6 litres of berries this week. They are still young bushes, so I assume that in coming years I will get more.

on the other side of the tunnel lavender takes over:

The tunnel looked like this a month ago. We had a slow start in the spring and especially cucurbits suffered and died as I moved them into the tunnel far too early.  We are normally past night frosts after second week in May, but had some really chilly biting nights this June. We are getting both tomatoes and cucumbers, but slightly later than anticipated. I am not sure that our peppers and chillies make it this year, but so much depends on the autumn. A warm, mild autumn can prolong growing season here immensely.

I like making my work as easy as is possible ans thus make use of companion planting. I always plant my cabbages and kales with nasturtiums. When I have had kales without their pretty flower companion they don't seem to thrive as well. It also keeps weeds down.

This is how kale bed looked in June:

...and this is a shot of the abundance now:

I had a great "Monty Don" moment when I used twigs to support the pea plants in the spring. They looked nice and kept pigeons from pecking the pea shoots.

Great, I thought, I've done it and it was easy. After a few weeks my peas started to look a bit sad with holes in them. I thought that flea beetles had had their fill and took it easy. Certainly the mini critters could not touch that size of plants I assumed as they were well under way. Unfortunately the peas did not seem to grow, actually they were shrinking! Look:

The day came when I realised what was going on; sparrows, unlike the pigeons, don't think twigs as any hindrance. They rejoiced my arrangement of feeding platforms to the delicious pea shoot buffet.

I don't like netting any of my plants if I can avoid it. I happily share our strawberries with the birds as long as they leave some for us. (Although the slugs annoy me carving the strawberries into inedible baubles. I hope that the birds take some of them too!) I did end up with a huge pea cage as otherwise there would not have been a single pea to eat. This again is from May, the cage is now choc-a-block with peas. The tepee supports runner beans.

I will come back with new pictures soon. I think I stopped taking pictures as I could not do anything with them.

I will also write what I have been doing since the garden went into its  mid-summer hiatus, you know when everything has been planted and there is very little to harvest. We have now entered the harvest season, so writing will be in between the bottling and freezing and eating, hmmm, eating all the lovely vegetables.

In addition to the edibles, I made a cutting garden in the shed end of the allotment and am now enjoying fresh flowers in the house and binding and giving bouquets to my friends. Bliss! You can see the beginnings in the shed picture. An early morning picture from July:

The wilderness against the wall is perennial sweet peas. They are in full bloom now, I promise to show!

If you have pictures and stories of your garden, leave a link in comments. I love to see other people's gardens both in real life and on the net.

Winter Allotment

Warning: this post contains ugly pictures...allotment under construction. 

The weather is still decidedly wintry here in Northern England. We had a couple of amazingly mild weeks in the beginning of February, but since then it's been the icy winds from the North pole. During those nice weather weeks I burnt weeds on my patch.

It took me ages to get the fire going at the rate that was enough to destroy semi moist weeds, the dry ones went into flames faster than I could feed the fire. See, there is a rule that the fire should be small, but if the fire is small, then it is difficult to burn the weeds. I managed it, but did come home stinking of smoke and hair full of soot. I think I have sussed it out now...

This time of the year the allotment wields just a bit of winter veg. I have already lifted most of the root vegetables, but still have some kales like Nero di Toscana and the curly one:

Although I have lived here a good while now, I am still full of wonder that is winter growing. I can harvest in the middle of the winter?!?!? For someone who grew up with winters in frost and snow this is absolutely amazing. This is my harvest of purple sprouting broccoli and carrots from yesterday:

I don't grow carrots during the summer for autumn harvest as the allotments are riddled with carrot flies. You have to be covering them up and weeding under a fleece etc to have a success. I sow my carrots in the late summer to have some carrots for Christmas and beyond. I might have a go doing them in the polytunnel next winter.

The tunnel has winter greens, salad leaves, pak-choi, parsley and coriander. We haven't needed to buy any green salads this winter, nor have we bought green herbs. In addition of what is growing here, we froze some of our herb harvest from the summer. Financially that is probably where the savings are biggest; herbs and winter salads.

Outside I have continued building the beds, I might have shown you pictures of this before, but here goes; garlic bed (the garlic is showing now!) and the bean fence.

The preparation for the runner beans. They can take the rotting compost dug deep under where they grow. It gives them extra moisture and heat. Same goes for the cucurbit family.
I will prep positions where they are to grow shortly.

In the picture above you see a fence behind my compost bins. Behind the fence there is five more metres of allotment. Unfortunately some of the previous occupiers have piled a lot stuff there. There is organic matter, which doesn't bother me, I can sieve it, burn it, re-distribute it in my allotment. It is the rubbish, that is buried there as well, that annoys me. And the tree/bush. It grows on the high ground and makes this end of the allotment shady. I have asked the society and it is Ok to take it down. I will sort out that pile of rubbish, but not just yet. Why? There was a similar problem in the other end, although no organic matter...just plastic, rusty metal, broken glass, broken glass, broken glass. I have been tidying that up last year and during this winter and this is what has come out. (Only a fraction of the whole, lots of it has been carted to the dump already):

I really don't understand how anyone would do this. The plant bed on the right is one of the areas and I cleared that length last summer. The bed behind has just been cleared and we planted a damson tree in the corner.

The amount of broken glass is totally surreal. I think that the occupiers have collected glass panes to make a green house and then not got around to do it and the glass has got broken. There are still whole panes here as well.  I will need to think how to get rid of the big ones.

I can make a mess too. I have been piling wood and other useful stuff into my coldframe while I am working around it to stop all the weeds growing. Just to remind myself about this stage of the construction:

I hope to take some more pictures now that I have even more bits sorted. The coming weekend should be mild here, so I hope to get working again. Are you still under snow or is your garden maybe in full production on the other side of the equator?

Gardening Diary

I try to keep gardening diary, but fail often miserably. I do manage to write down the first spring sowings and have made a plan last autumn how I want to plant this year's garden. I do practice crop rotation, so it is important to make a note of the planting, because it is oh so easy to forget where the different plants were. Above is my diary in its new jacket. I ended with IKEA waterproof cloth, as I know that I will handle this book with dirty hands, which is in clear evidence in the picture below.

It looked like this to start with

One of those white jobs bought as a lot of five. I chose not to glue the cover this time, but made pocket ends.

I thought that the pocket outside could hold a pencil and a seed packet or such. Ehm...that seam looks awful! I just could not be bothered to do it again as it is purely decoration, the binding. Sometimes I just let be as is and that's ok as well.

I am not a real green thumbed gardener as I have not perused all the seed catalogues as yet...I will soon though and I will consult both my box of seeds and the notes of what I have planned to plant. I try to get something new to try for each year, although the newness might be just another variety of a vegetable or flower I am already familiar with. A certain new thing I want to grow this year is a cucamelon.

Do you have gardening plans as yet? Will you try something new?

Diary, allotment and blocked noses

One of Elf Son's Christmas wishes was to have a diary. I had some lined notebooks with white/ugly covers, so I went to work and covered his with some oil cloth.

The oil cloth adds to it a bit of old fashioned charm and a masculine touch. I bought these notebooks cheaply as a lot of 5 and have since covered them for different uses. I have one for my allotment diary as well, but it is missing a cover. I was fancying a garden themed cotton, but might end with waterproof cover...I'll show you when I have got my act together. I must ask Elf Son, what type of diary he keeps. I know he writes regularly, but knowing him, it could be as easily about his real life as a fantasy diary.

The allotment is in its winter hibernation and only things to harvest are the kales, purple broccoli, lettuces of different types, parsley and coriander. The leafier things live in our polytunnel. Today is a cold day and we even have a smattering of snow on the ground, unusual for our coastal location.

The picture is from autumn, since there are still some flowers there. This bed is now  sowed with garlic.

As an experiment I sowed two beds with winter clover

During the autumn I have been busy building raised beds with paths in between covered with weed suppressing membrane and wood chips. I hope to finish building the rest of them in February.

In other news Elf Son has generously shared his winter bug with Elf Husband, who is now on sofa duty looking miserable. I have felt the virus rummaging, but keep my fingers crossed for my immune system defeating this one. I just cannot be bothered with two colds in one winter.