Neglect

Well I've certainly neglected this blog in favour of my other one @ http://sawdustinmysocks.blogspot.com/

But I've still been quite busy growing and preserving. As I speak I've got a load of apples and raspberries in the food dryer and we'll be having our own cauliflower, cabbage, beans and potatoes for tea.

The allotment has suffered a little this year as there is no way we could get down there to water it as much as it needed so some crops look terrible (sweetcorn looked bad but now the mice have eaten it anyway, so that doesn't matter anymore!). But others, like the squashes, are doing well.

The raspberries are brilliant this year and from one row we're picking a huge punit each week.

I think I'll be putting some more in next year!

Allotment HQ

A phone call the Thursday before last from my mothering law told me that one of her friends had a shed going spare, but it had to be gone by Sunday.

I got dad to meet me there on the Saturday with a trailer (I'd already taken it down) and we drove it up to the allotment. The shed is in great condition but it was quite heavy to carry across a very muddy field - I'm fairly sure my arms were 2 inches long by the time we'd taken the final load across.

This Saturday (with the help of my friend Terry) I managed to put up the shed at its new home down on the allotment. I've re-felted the roof but I've still got to board up the window and give it a lick of paint to make it look a bit nicer. It already feels like a nice base on the allotment - I'm looking forward to putting our little ball bearing lawn mower and car boot tools down there.

I'm really pleased with our freebie - Thanks to my mothering law!

Not a football fan

To anyone that knows me this will not come as a shock. I don't like football.

But today I got guilted into going to watch a match at the pub. The trouble was its the first time I've seen the sun this year and I was going to waste two hours of daylight, I wasn't happy!

In the end we came to a compromise, I would watch the football with Terry if he gave me an hour digging on the allotment. He agreed and I think we made real headway on turning the soil over on the newer half of the allotment ready for the spring. A few more Sundays like this and I'll be ready for the planting season!

Christmas Dinner

Well I'm quite pleased with myself. Yesterday was the end to a good gardening year, we had a group of friends over for a late Christmas dinner and all the veg were homegrown. We had potatoes, butternut squash, Brussels sprouts, parsnips, carrots, swede and leeks, I felt quite smug at what we'd achieved and how good it all tasted (with some good cooking from my wife). The turkey was from a friend of my fathers so it was quite an accountable dinner.
On a less positive note my allotment is constantly under a couple of inches of water and the carrots have started to float to the surface (I wish I dug them up sooner and clamped them).
Here's to next year where I aim to be self sufficient in veg (and maybe I can talk Claire into having a couple of turkeys on the garden!

Allotment Open Day

Another busy weekend. Yesterday was our first ever open day for the allotments and Felix Dennis (the owner of FHM) was meant to come down to open it officially but couldn't make it due to illness (he gave the land for the allotment to be built on).

I managed to talk my mum into coming up and helping me weed the plot before people started to look round, so the plot was looking quite tidy. The day was really nice with Claire's family coming up as well, there was a little veg stall and a raffle as well as a guess the seed competition which I was gutted I didn't win (I'll never know which I got wrong!).

Yesterday evening I also managed to pick a massive bucket full of hazel nuts off of our single tree, not sure what I'm going to do with them but its a shame to leave them (any ideas?).

The chicken and her little brood of chicks are doing well, the chicks are so fast now its almost impossible to catch them. Its great fun watching the mother fuss over them and break food up so they can eat it, although she is quite rough when she scrats at the grass and knocks an unsuspecting chick flying!

Trying To Rotovate

This weekend I had planned to rotovate the new half of our allotment, and today I managed to get down there for about 4 hours and achieved the grand total of nothing. The rotovater just bounced off the top and I ended up just leaving lines across the top. I think I'm going to have to admit defeat and get the man in with the tractor to do it the first time. I'm a bit gutted though as I got myself all worked up to do it.

We did manage to dig up one row of potatoes today and have trug completely full with them (I think if it had rained earlier we would have had more). Also we've been on a freezing mission - I picked a large bag of yellow egg plums and froze all of those and tonight Claire has been blanching beans by the hundred weight to put in the freezer (as well as cooking a Sunday roast with more vegetables than I can count (well five but it doesn't sound as impressive)).

I also brought another fig tree at a car boot, it has the biggest leaves I have ever seen on one and it's about half the price you'd pay in a nursery. I'm not sure what it is about trying to grow an exotic fruit that is notoriously difficult to grow but I'm determined to have some of my own figs at some point even if I have to have 10 trees!

What a difference a drop of rain makes

Now we can't even walk across the allotment. It's gone from rock hard soil to the stickiest mud in the world, when Claire walked across the plot she was 6 inches taller by the time she got to the other side! The ground just holds water, I'm sure it will be better once I've added some muck and soil improver but the gooseberry bush I planted last weekend has sunk! Everything else is look quite good though and the broad beans are running away!

We managed to get all the posts in and some grass seed down on the paths but it was just too sticky to do anything else. Back at home I planted my sweetcorn in toilet tubes, I plan to grow loads with my squashes so there should be some left over for our new chicken (I didn't want to make too much noise about it but our old chickens have gone to a "better" place to make way for some that will lay eggs. we have 5 POL being picked up tomorrow).

In preparation for the summer on the allotment I've brought an old ball bearing lawn mower to mow the paths (£10) as well as starting to collect tools at car boots (also brought a drip watering system for £4 today to water the greenhouse at home, I love car boots!).

Starting on the allotment

Well I've finally made a start on the allotment! Yesterday mum came round and gave me a hand to mark out the paths and the different beds for crop rotation, the fruit area and an area for a shed and compost bins (all marked with blue string).

Although its been rotovated twice the soil it still like concrete and takes a lot of digging, no good for sowing seeds directly into the ground just yet! We did manage to plant a few things though.

A nice long 15ft row of raspberries went in (pinched from mums garden), along with rhubarb, a gooseberry bush and some comfrey. Today we also managed to put in the broad beans I'd been growing in pots and net them over to protect them from pigeons and rabbits. The main trouble, besides the rock hard soil, is the lack of water on site, I've been taking a large drum of water every time I go down but it doesn't go very far!

I've also put in four raised beds, these are quick fix pallet collars that I've stained up, but they look nice and they will help me grow root crops until I get the soil sorted out (then they can be used to grow asparagus next year). My plan to get parsnips and carrots in now is to import some soil (there's some nice soil at the farm) and mix it with a little compost along with fish, blood and bone. At least then I'll have some for Christmas dinner!

Next weekend I'm thinking about fencing the whole plot with rabbit wire as everyone else seems to be doing it and there seems to be a lot of wildlife.

Allotment and Rain

I've been earing up for this weekend for ages so its been somewhat of a let down.

On wednesday night we went to Honeyborne to sign up for our new allotment along with 40 other people and paid our yearly fee of £20. We were given, in exchange, a long list of rules (more donts than Do's) and a 15m by 10m patch of land in the village of Honeyborne. This allotment is totally new so I wasnt sure what to expect but my hopes were high for at least some grass and resonable soil.

Today (Friday) was the first day I could get down there and I invited my Mum along so we could look at the site, do a little planning and marking out and hopefully aome planting of the fruit bushes I've got sat in pots. Wrong.

Today it hasn't stopped raining for more than 5 minutes and when we went down to see the allotment we were the only people in a field of mud and water. I say mud but it is mostly clay.

I took my spade so I could see what it was like and I could only get it in to half a spades depth, the clay was that thick and strong. It was raining so hard we had to come back and warm ourselves with some fish and chips and decided that planning was best done on paper. I had used a compass to find out which way north was so now a bit of arm chair gardening is called for!

One thing I do need to get is a shed for my allotment (not another shed!) to store gardening tools in but I dont really want to spend any money down there, I might try freecycle unless anyone has got one they're taking down?

Allotment news!

In the past couple of weeks since my last post I’ve been quite busy.Work wise I’m still working for mum and dad on the farm but I’m starting to look a bit more for other work (although I’m still not sure what I want to do!). I’ve been working with my little brother loads so that’s been really good and he even came round the weekend before last so we had a mess around in the garden trying to light a fire by friction. I think if it hadn’t got so dark so quickly then we would have succeeded but unfortunately we didn’t and we’ll have to try harder next time!

I’ve also started work on the baby shed for all my gardening tools, as the one we inherited when we moved here leaks like a sieve and is a complete mess. I’ve built the shed flat-pack-able so if we move house I can bring it along, but it weighs a stupid amount because I can never build anything small enough!

I managed to get it erected this weekend and most of the roof on so I’m feeling quite good about it, although I’ve run out of cedar and I’ve still haven’t got a door to put on it!

The exciting news is that I’ve been told I can have an allotment! Its about 5 miles away but it will mean I can grow loads more veg and I’m really looking forward to the social side of it. It’s not until April as at the moment it’s just a green field and this is a new site. I'm not sure what to grow but its time to have another look in the seed catalogues, I feel like a kid at christmas!