The sloe way to go.....

When you have an allotment you very quickly learn that you need to find ways of preserving your harvests. It is very much a case of feast or famine at times; not famine in the case of not having anything to eat from your plot. This doesn't happen too often apart from maybe when you reach the hunger gap in the spring; that time when your over-wintered crops have run out and the spring sowings aren't quite ready yet. But rather more a case of feast or glut I guess! Try as hard as you might, sometimes you can just get overwhelmed with the harvest of whichever veg is in season, whether it's the dreaded courgette glut or runner beans or what have you.

So preserving is an allotmenteer's best friend.

But we can't grow everything we want on our plots and for that we can raid nature's larder, for come September the hedgerows are teeming with berries and the like.

And so it was yesterday, my friend Judi and I headed off to a secret location to harvest fruit from the hedgerow; namely some sloes.

    

Sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn which is one of the earliest shrubs to flower in spring. Masses of white blossom line the hedges and roadways. Looking back I remember the blossom being plentiful this spring so we were hopeful of there being loads of berries.

We weren't disappointed.

The berries have this purple/blue blush on them and darken to a deep purple/black. Ideally it is best to wait until the first frost of the year before harvesting the berries but with our winters getting milder, the first frost can be quite some way off yet in the autumn.

I restricted myself to half  a trug-full. Being a pro at sloe-picking, Judi had a bucket and picked 4kg!

Our next stop is the nearest Asda to buy some Gordon's Gin. They currently have the best price on 1lt bottles.

Sloe gin here we come!

View from the Plot - May 2017

I thought I'd try something a little different this month and post a video update of how the plot is looking. A quick google suggested the best way of doing this is to post the video to YouTube and then link/embed it into a blog post.

There were a few teething problems but my channel on YouTube is now set up and here is the view of my plot at the end of May, ok start of June because I didn't get the chance to film the video until yesterday...

Previously I've done live Periscope tours on Twitter but of course, as they are live, I don't get to see them many more times as they disappear in my feed. So I might try posting videos once and a while. We'll see! I might even get better with the commentary. Yesterday I had to cope with a windy day and someone strimming nearby and my quiet voice....

View from the Plot - April 2017

So, what did I get up to on the allotment last month? To some extent it feels like very little, although looking back through my diary quite a lot of sowing and potting on has gone on. I guess it feels like I haven't accomplished much more than more digging because the plot is still relatively empty.

I dug up the remainder of last year's crops last month; the last few leeks and carrots and a lovely big parsnip. Currently deciding whether to make a parsnip cake with it! The purple sprouting broccoli seemed to finish quite abruptly. I think because I missed picking it for a few days, the heads went too far and started flowering.

As far as this year's crops are concerned, the onion sets I started off in modules were planted out and I've gradually been planting the chitted seed potatoes, just one more variety to go out now and they will get planted where the PSB are. I'd left those to flower as the bees seem to like them.

PSB left to flower

I've sown some root crops; two types of carrots, beetroot, parsnip and some radish. I warmed the soil this year and sowed them in the small polytunnels I use for my sweet potatoes and think that made a difference, particularly with the parsnips although come to think of it, I'm not sure the beetroot have germinated yet.

I've also sown some calendula and eschscholzia on the plot and am pretty sure they have germinated.

The first asparagus spear appeared a good week or so earlier than usual. The spears have been a bit sporadic again. Maybe I don't have enough crowns? Not sure. Unfortunately a frost on 26 April put paid to a few of them that were ready for harvesting. I cut those out and am pleased to see new spears popping their heads out of the soil.

New asparagus spears appearing

Weather-wise, the temperatures are still up and down and it feels a bit risky planting anything out at the moment. Another cold night is forecast in the coming week but after that things are looking a bit more promising...

The main problem is a lack of rain. The ground is bone dry, like dust. I can't remember when we last had a decent deluge and I think we're going to need to have quite a few to make any difference.

It does look like the strawberry crop may be a good one though. Although the blackened centres of some of the flowers suggests some were damaged by the frost last week.

Lots of flowers on the strawberries!

On the whole though I have a feeling it's going to be another challenging growing year!

Introducing.......Plot 51b

As promised a couple of weeks ago, an update on where I am with the 'new' half plot. You can see what it looked like when TK and me took it on a couple of years ago here. I guess I really started working on it last summer. I had previously tackled an area at the top end of the plot with the vague notion of having a polytunnel. One of the storms put paid to that notion when I saw another one on the site flattened for the second time....our allotment site is on the edge of town with farmland bordering on two sides so it's very open and the wind really races through when it blows!

As the plot was in quite a poor state, the worst weed to deal with has been couch grass and really the best way of dealing with this is to literally remove every root; and when every spadeful you dig up is just a mass of couch grass root system, you know it's going to take a while to make sense of a plot. Before long though I'd dug one bed which equated to about a quarter of the plot. I decided this would be a bed for currant bushes as I loved a blackcurrant cordial I'd made from the berries from my father's garden.

Blackcurrant bed

One bush was inherited on the plot but needed relocating for a second time; this time I made sure I cleared the rootball completely, When we had moved it the first time, in our innocence we just dug it up and replanted it with the result that the poor bush was being smothered by grasses.

A purchase of a proper bush, Ben Nevis, from the now defunct Edible Garden Show, a bargain buy of another variety called Ben Ojebyn and cuttings which had rooted filled the bed nicely. I just need to create some kind of fruit cage to protect them now!

Next job was to try and limit the out of control raspberries to one section, so I've made a bed in the middle of the plot so that I can contain them more. There does seem to be a rogue plant in the bed which I think is a thornless blackberry. It has flower buds forming for the first time this year so hopefully we'll know more soon!

The raspberry bed with the possible thornless blackberry in the foreground

There will be a flower bed but this area is pretty much overgrown still. I did cover it with cardboard to keep the weeds down, but many of them have grown through it as it breaks down.....

At the top of the plot is the lovely shed we inherited from another plotholder. The area next to it is where a couple of fruit trees will go together with the thornless blackberry. The plan is to train it as a cordon along wires between two fence posts. I'm in the process of creating this area at the moment. I'm also planning on erecting that short length of chestnut paling between two of the posts to act as a wind break of sorts. One of the fruit trees is a small pear tree called Little Sweetie from Blackmoor Nursery. It won't ever get bigger than 5ft odd and as it blossoms so much earlier, I figured the more protection I can give it on our open site the better. The other fruit tree is a Victoria Plum, also from Blackmoor. Thank you Santa!

So still very much a work in progress (aren't all allotments?!) but it's starting to take shape.

Plot 51b - April 2017

Famous last words.....a rebirth

So.....having said three years ago that I was going to make my life easier and merge this blog with my main one i.e. so I only had one blog to maintain and hopefully post more often to....I've decided to do a U-turn and restart this blog.

Quite a lot has changed on the allotment since the last post here, although there haven't been many blog updates on my main blog either, so no change there!

I guess the main change is that now puberty has kicked in and schoolwork become heavier as his GCSEs get closer, there is no 'TK and' anymore, just 'me' on the plot now. He has come down occasionally to help harvest potatoes and he did come to help demolish an old shed on the plot.

Goodbye old shed....

Sadly a case of preferring destruction to construction and creation!

The other big change is the other half of our plot became available. I ummed and ahhed briefly about whether to take it on as well as our existing half plot. On the plus side, it had a shed albeit a rather decrepit one, and it would give us (me) more room to grow fruit. Our existing half plot was pretty much full to bursting each year so a bit more ground would come in handy.

On the minus side, the plot hadn't really been worked much in the time we'd been there and it was pretty overgrown with out of control raspberries in the middle of it. Basically it was going to take a lot of effort to bring it under control.

I decided it was worth the extra work and effort it would take. Didn't want to kick myself and find someone else take it on and usually you can kiss goodbye to getting another plot next to you for many years. In fact, since our allotment association took on the management of the site, plots have been let on a regular basis and we are due to have a waiting list again very soon.

Two years later, the new half plot is vaguely tamed but with still a lot of work to be done. And yes I know that two years with not a lot accomplished is terrible progress but in my defence for the first year TK was 'working' the plot for his DofE skill and I wasn't allowed to do much on it until he had finished.

I think the progress on the new half plot can form the basis of the next post!

Blog Merger

I've decided to make my life a little bit easier and am merging this blog with my quilting blog. I'll keep this one open but will be posting about our allotment on the quilting blog from now on.

Thanks for reading!

Joanna 

A New Year and All That..........

It dawned on me this morning that seeing as a new growing season will be upon us before we know it, we've kind of had it easy working on the allotment so far. These first six months have just been about the digging. Ok we managed a small harvest this year, hell we managed to survive on our own grown potatoes for four of those six months! But there hasn't really been any pressure to grow anything.

 

But with the new year just around the corner, we now need to plan ahead and make sure we plant things at the right time.

 

It starts getting serious from now on.....well not serious but it will be important to do things  at the right time. We sowed some spring cabbage seeds a couple of months too late in the hope of growing them over the winter, but at the moment they are still tiny seedlings. We'll plant them out on the plot but I have a feeling they won't amount to much. Time will tell I guess.

 

Father Christmas very kindly brought us a new spade and a composter. Thought he would have given us some seeds too but glad that he didn't as I really wanted to pick the varieties ourselves.

Seed potatoes will be available soon. Think we will have a couple of rows of main crop next year and just one of earlies.

 

So next plan of action will be to plant the spring cabbages out, erect the composter and prepare the bed for the potatoes.

It's been difficult finding the time to fit the allotment in the last week or so and the weather has been quite stormy too, but here's hoping we can get back into a routine in  the new year.

 

Can't wait!